Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis, Hit-Monkey), Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham, Smurfs), Keeley Jones (Juno Temple, Venom: The Last Dance) and Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift, Snow White) all sit in a diner booth looking adoringly at each other: that's it, that's your first glimpse at Ted Lasso season four. The heartwarming Apple TV+ hit comedy is now officially back in production, after a new season was locked in earlier in 2025. And no,"we're not in Richmond anymore" — at least initially. The streaming platform has unveiled a first image from the series' fourth season, and also dropped a "now in production" video that matches the filming of the moment that the still is from with some behind-the-scenes audio. On YouTube, the clip comes with that Wizard of Oz-paraphrasing note about the setting, too, aptly given that Lasso is famously from Kansas. If you've been believing that more Ted Lasso would be on the way ever since the kindhearted show seemed to wrap up its storyline for good at the end of the third season, that faith has proven well-founded — and here's more proof. Sudeikis is back in his two-time Emmy-winning role, donning the American college football coach-turned-English soccer manager's moustache again. While only Waddingham, Temple and Swift are also in the debut image from season four, they're not the only fellow returning cast members. As The Hollywood Reporter confirms, Brendan Hunt (Bless This Mess), aka Coach Beard, is back both on-screen and among the new season's producers — a behind-the-camera role he also held in the first three seasons — and Brett Goldstein (Shrinking) is also doing double duty, reprising the part of Roy Kent and executive producing. These familiar Ted Lasso faces will have company from a number of new cast members, with Tanya Reynolds (The Decameron), Jude Mack (Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning), Faye Marsay (Andor), Rex Hayes (getting his first screen credit), Aisling Sharkey (Jurassic World Dominion), Abbie Hern (My Lady Jane) and Grant Feely (Chicago PD) all joining the series. The latter is now portraying Ted's son Henry. And no, that "we're not in Richmond anymore" description won't prove true for long, with Ted Lasso season four set to chart its namesake's Richmond comeback to coach a second-division women's team. As Sudeikis noted when the new episodes were announced, "as we all continue to live in a world where so many factors have conditioned us to 'look before we leap', in season four, the folks at AFC Richmond learn to leap before they look, discovering that wherever they land, it's exactly where they're meant to be". There's no trailer yet for Ted Lasso's fourth season, but check out Apple TV+ "now in production" video below: Season four of Ted Lasso will stream via Apple TV+ — we'll update you when a release date is announced. Read our full review of season two and season three, our interview with Brendan Hunt and our chat with Bill Lawrence, who co-developed the series.
At some point in the near future, this might be the question: what can't you book via Airbnb? The platform began as a way for travellers to spend a night in everyday homes instead of hotels, but it has long moved past simply letting folks stay in each other's houses. Its latest evolution: hanging out with celebrities, getting you locking in services such as personal chefs and trainers, and also everything from ramen-making sessions and playing beach volleyball with an Olympian to worshipping pastry with an expert and exploring Notre Dame's restoration. If none of this sounds like a huge surprise, that's because Airbnb has been levelling up simply enjoying a night in someone else's pad for a while now. Think: special listings for the Up house, Prince's Purple Rain abode, the Beetlejuice house, Shrek's swamp, Barbie's Malibu DreamHouse, the Ted Lasso pub, the Moulin Rouge! windmill and Hobbiton. It has also offered up the Bluey house, the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine, The Godfather mansion, the South Korean estate where BTS filmed In the Soop, the Sanderson sisters' Hocus Pocus cottage, the Paris theatre that inspired The Phantom of the Opera and a Christina Aguilera-hosted two-night Las Vegas stay, among others. [caption id="attachment_1004284" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Adrienne Raquel[/caption] This time, the platform is grouping its expanded range into three categories: services, experiences and originals. The first is meant to add to wherever you're staying, and the second is all about making the most of your getaway destination with experts and locals. As for the third, that's where the likes of Megan Thee Stallion and Sabrina Carpenter come in. With services, Airbnb has launched ten categories in 260 cities, aiming to cover hotel-style amenities such as gym access and spa treatments. Also on the list: personalised photography sessions, massages, haircuts and blow dries, makeup, manicures and pedicures, full catering and yoga. The platform is engaging providers with an average of ten years of experience, such as chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants and other award-winners. [caption id="attachment_1004285" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Saeka Shimada[/caption] Among the experiences, options are on offer in 650 cities, with each designed to give you an authentic taste of wherever you're heading — sometimes literally. Michelin-recognised Japanese chef Saburo Ishigōka is taking care of the ramen, for instance, while architect Axelle Ponsonnet will give you the scoop on Notre Dame and stylist Jamie Mizrahi will help refresh your wardrobe. You can also travel through Andean landscapes and sacred Inca sites on horseback with an expert in Andean culture, and do some Lucha libre training with a professional luchador. Fancy playing tourist in your own town with these experiences? You'll be able to. Keen to gather the gang? Later in 2025, you'll also be able to see who else is heading along on an experience before you book. [caption id="attachment_1004286" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Daehan Chae[/caption] As for the new Airbnb Originals, selections named so far include hanging out on the Short n' Sweet tour set with Sabrina Carpenter, creating an anime alter-ego with Megan Thee Stallion, hitting Rio's Leblon Beach to play volleyball with Carol Solberg, throwing a spiral and tucking into barbecue with Patrick Mahomes, celebrating all things SEVENTEEN in Seoul and getting cooking with The French Bastards' Raphaelle Elbaz. "Seventeen years ago, we changed the way people travel. More than two-billion guests later, Airbnb is synonymous with a place to stay," said Airbnb CEO and Co-Founder Brian Chesky, announcing its newest additions. "With the launch of services and experiences, we're changing travel again. Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb." [caption id="attachment_1004287" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Paz Olivares-Droguett[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1004288" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Dani Pujalte[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1004289" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Sela Shiloni[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1004292" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Peden + Munk[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1004290" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Damien Maloney[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1004291" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Jackie Beale[/caption] For more information about Airbnb's latest additions, and to make bookings, head to the Airbnb website. Top image: Adrienne Raquel. Feeling inspired to book a getaway? You can now book your next dream holiday through Concrete Playground Trips with deals on flights, stays and experiences at destinations all around the world.
Long-awaited prequels to huge fantasy franchises: everyone's doing them. Within less than a fortnight, HBO has stepped back into the Game of Thrones with House of the Dragon and now, weekly from Friday, September 2, Prime Video brings The Lord of the Rings back to the screen. Yes, it's a great time to be a fan of the biggest names in the genre, and of two of the most popular page-to-screen sagas ever printed then filmed. It's also quite the moment for anyone keen on mammoth power battles between good and evil, and the historical-looking but purely fanciful worlds in which they unfurl (and of oh-so-many expensive special effects as well). In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power's case, JRR Tolkien's stories make the move from Peter Jackson's six LoTR and The Hobbit cinema releases onto streaming, courtesy of the show's initial eight-episode first season. It's no less breathtaking to behold than the first three movies, however (the headache-inducing high frame rates used in the latter three flicks made New Zealand's stunning landscape look like any old ordinary hills, rocks and grass, and made for awful viewing). Is such astonishing spectacle enough to recapture the magic of Middle-earth? The answer is right there in every image. This debut batch of instalments reportedly cost US$465 million, and the visual splendour all that money has bought goes a long way. That said, sumptuous sights aren't the only drawcard that The Rings of Power boasts. Like knowing that House of the Dragon was coming, and winter as well, it's been impossible to avoid news about The Rings of Power. The series has been in the works for five years, and is already locked in for five seasons, all jumping back to Middle-earth's Second Age. That's a period of elves, men, dwarves and harfoots — precursors to hobbits — and of the lurking evil of Sauron, plus orcs, trolls and more. It's also when the titular jewellery is forged. On the page, it's largely been covered in an appendix to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, taking this new series into previously unseen on-screen territory. And, as The Rings of Power focuses on, it's where Galadriel and Elrond's tales truly kicked in, with Morfydd Clark (Saint Maud) taking over from Cate Blanchett and Robert Aramayo (The King's Man) doing the same for Hugo Weaving, with their characters thousands of years younger. Showing how history repeats by repeating a past hit's scenario but setting it further back in history: everyone's doing that, too. The young Galadriel narrates The Rings of Power's explanatory introduction, setting the scene for the show's fight against Sauron — and slowly putting the pieces in place for the compilation of a fellowship to do so. She tells of the dark lord Morgoth and his defeat in wide-ranging wars. She notes that the elf Finrod (Will Fletcher, The Road Dance) was convinced that Sauron, Morgoth's apprentice, still lingered afterwards. And she advises that such a belief and the search to prove it right cost Finrod his life. He was Galadriel's brother, and now she has taken up his mission. Alas, a time of relative peace, as Middle-earth has been under since Morgoth was vanquished, isn't a prime time for Galadriel's quest. She's still scouring far and wide for Sauron, but High King Gil-galad of the Elves (Benjamin Walker, The Ice Road) wants to bathe her in glory for past victories instead. If that's the path she took, there wouldn't be much of a series — although it's not The Rings of Power's only narrative strand. Elrond, Galadriel's closet friend, has been tasked with seeking help from the dwarves of Khazad-dum to build a new forge, but Prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur, A Confession) is wary. Fellow elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova, The Undoing) follows strange happenings in a human village, where he also warms to single mother Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi, Bombshell). And harfoot Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavanagh, True History of the Kelly Gang) and her fellow diminutive creatures get drawn into odd occurrences, too, after a ball of fire tumbles from the heavens. As overseen by showrunners and executive producers JD Payne and Patrick McKay, with filmmaker JA Bayona (A Monster Calls, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) directing the first two episodes, The Rings of Power spends its opening double instalments setting the scene and building its world. More subplots and characters are weaved in — including a bearded stranger (Daniel Weyman, The North Water) and the stargazing of Sadoc Burrows (Lenny Henry, The Sandman) among the harfoots, elf-prejudiced human Halbrand (Charlie Vickers, Palm Beach), plus Durin's relationship with his king father (Peter Mullan, The Underground Railroad) — and more will follow given the show's hefty cast. A sense of scale shimmers through at every moment, whether via all of the faces gracing the screen or the locations such as Elvish home Lindon, the dwarves' Khazad-dum or the Sundering Seas that they traverse. And it's that grandeur, unsurprisingly, that's one of The Rings of Power's biggest early strengths. While Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit fans will have had The Rings of Power on their must-watch list since it was first announced — it's the franchise's equivalent of second breakfast, after all — it doesn't just take that loyalty for granted. It isn't as content to blatantly tread in its predecessors' footsteps either (not as much as House of the Dragon, with the two destined to be forever compared), even if it's clear that it likely won't deviate too far either. The Rings of Power feels lived in from the outset, but also excited and eager, as if it too wants to roam far and wide rather than merely return to beloved confines. Among the dazzling spectacle, there's a sense of adventure and discovery about the series as well, leaving its audience as keen as a dwarf with a pick to keep digging into more. Tolkien's prose and the films that've sprung from it have always glistened with earnestness and sincerity, and favoured a poetic take on its noble-versus-wicked fray; that gleams again here, thankfully. Perhaps that's what makes The Rings of Power's familiar parts shine with possibility — and makes it seem like anything could follow, even when viewers already know that Sauron won't be toppled no matter how much determination pumps through Galadriel's veins. The first episode doesn't completely find its pace, but by the time the second wraps up, the show has established both an enticing starting point and a firm foundation to keep building upon. Proving epic in all the expected ways, and yet also thrilling via its own surprises: yes, that's powerful. Check out the trailer for The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power below: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power streams weekly via Prime Video from Friday, September 2. Images: Matt Grace / Ben Rothstein.
Here's one way to brighten up this supremely frosty winter: rug up indoors, get cosy on the couch and belt out a tune while watching your favourite Disney musicals. Earlier this year, the Mouse House announced that it was bringing sing-along versions of heap of its popular flicks to Disney+, starting with Encanto. If you're done singing about Bruno, you can now look forward to crooning along with The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast as well. The OG animated version of The Lion King — not the recent live-action version — is getting the at-home karaoke treatment, hitting the streaming platform on Friday, August 5. Yes, that's when you'll be able to feel the love (tonight), and celebrate the circle of life as well. It'll be joined by a sing-long version of The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, so there's your double feature sorted. Prefer to sing about being someone's guest or tales as old as time instead? Then make a music-filled date with Beauty and the Beast — both versions — on Friday, August 19. So, you can pick between the 1991 animated flick and the 2017 live-action movie, or give your lungs a workout to both back to back. Plus, if you're not done with Disney fairy tales, Tangled will also get the sing-along treatment on the same date. Gone are the days when you had to wait for special cinema screenings to do what everyone can't stop themselves from doing while watching these films anyway — which, depending on how well you can hold a tune or how confident you are singing in public, might be a blessing. If you're new to the whole sing-along setup, as you watch, lyrics will dance across your TV screen when it's time to belt out ballads. So, if you don't know all the words yet (or if you're viewing with someone who thinks they do, but inserts their own mistaken lyrics), they'll all be there for you. Disney+ currently has sing-along versions of Moana and The Little Mermaid available as well — and, as also announced earlier this year, Frozen and Frozen 2 are on their way. The sing-along versions of The Lion King and The Lion King II: Simba's Pride will be available to stream via Disney+ from Friday, August 5 — and sing-along versions of both the animated and live-action versions of Beauty and the Beast, as well as Tangled, will hit on Friday, August 19.
In 2024, Doja Cat topped the Triple J Hottest 100 of songs from 2023 and added Coachella headliner to her list of achievements. This year, she's notching up a first touring-wise: the superstar's debut arena gigs in Australia and New Zealand. Come November and December 2025, the 'Say So', 'Kiss Me More' and 'Vegas' talent will hit Auckland in Aotearoa, then head to Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney on her Aussie stops. The five-city trip Down Under kicks off on Tuesday, November 18 at Spark Arena. In Australia, Doja Cat has a date with Perth's RAC Arena on Saturday, November 22, followed by Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on Tuesday, November 25. Next comes Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Saturday, November 29 before wrapping up on Monday, December 1 at Qudos Bank Arena. The Aussie and NZ shows are part of the rapper's Ma Vie world tour, which also has international stints in Manila, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok and Kaohsiung locked in for December. The run of dates takes its name from Doja Cat's upcoming fifth album Vie, which releases on Friday, September 26. Jack Antonoff- and Y2K-produced single 'Jealous Type' is out now, with new tune first debuted live at San Francisco's Outside Lands Music Festival at the beginning of August. [caption id="attachment_1018452" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Jacob Webster[/caption] Vie follows 2018's Amala, 2019's Hot Pink, Planet Her from 2021 and 2023's Scarlet on the Grammy-winner's discography. It's the latter that delivered 'Paint the Town Red' — 2023's Hottest 100 number one, which marked the first time that a female rapper and woman of colour topped the poll. The tune also sat at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for three weeks, was the first rap song to reach those heights in 2023 and topped the Billboard Global 200 chart for four weeks in a row, too. [caption id="attachment_950216" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Clay Junell via Flickr.[/caption] Doja Cat Ma Vie World Tour Australian and New Zealand 2025 Tuesday, November 18 — Spark Arena, Auckland Saturday, November 22 — RAC Arena, Perth Tuesday, November 25 — Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne Saturday, November 29 — Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane Monday, December 1 — Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney Doja Cat is touring Australia and New Zealand in November and December 2025, with ticket resales from Monday, August 25 at 10am local time and general sales from Thursday, August 28 at 11am. Head to Doja Cat's website for more details. Top image: Dana Jacobs/WireImage.
There's never a bad time to have a good yarn about the community with those tasked with looking after it. And on Wednesday, October 15, you'll have the opportunity to speak directly with the men and women in blue. Held at Canteen Cafe in South Melbourne Market from 10–11am, the Coffee with a Cop initiative is all about coming together for a genuine conversation. Sit down, sip on a top-notch free coffee and get to know your local officers. Best of all, there are no bookings required or specific agendas guiding your chat. Instead, it's simply a chance to ask questions, raise concerns and share your thoughts with those who play a key role in shaping the neighbourhood. Forming part of a Victoria Police strategy, informal engagement activities like a quick brew can help officers improve their working relationship with the community and better address local talking points. Perfect for both nearby residents and market traders looking to establish a stronger connection, this relaxed session aims to support the South Melbourne community and foster a more collaborative approach. Coffee with a Cop is happening from 10–11am on Wednesday, October 15, at Canteen Cafe in South Melbourne Market. Head to Instagram for more information.
Travelling to a galaxy far, far away sounds rather nice at this point in 2020. If you're a Star Wars fan, that's actually quite easy, too. While this year won't deliver a new movie in the franchise for the first time since 2014, the second season of TV spinoff The Mandalorian's is heading to Disney+ from Friday, October 30. For those that missed it or need a refresher — the Star Wars universe certainly does sprawl far and wide, both within its tales and in its many different movies, shows, books and games — the Emmy-nominated show follows the titular bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal). In the series' first season, which was set five years after Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi and aired last year, that meant tracking his latest gigs. And, it also involved charting his encounter with a fuzzy little creature officially known as The Child, but affectionately named Baby Yoda by everyone watching. Also on offer the first time around: Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito playing villain Moff Gideon, aka the ex-Galactic Empire security officer determined to capture The Child; everyone from Carl Weathers and Taika Waititi to Werner Herzog playing ex-magistrates, droids and enigmatic strangers; and plenty of planet-hopping. Yes, it was firmly a Star Wars TV series, and yes, it plans to continue in the same manner. As both the previously released first trailer and the just-dropped new glimpse of The Mandalorian's second season shows, it also intends to once again focus on one of television's best pairings. Not only is Mando back, but so is the oh-so-adorable Baby Yoda. The duo's quest to return to The Child's home planet continues, and they aren't parting ways on the journey — "wherever I go, he goes," Mando advises. In addition to showering viewers in Baby Yoda's cuteness, the eight-episode new season will see Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) pop up — it is a show about a bounty hunter, after all — plus Timothy Olyphant and Rosario Dawson join the cast. Behind the lens, directors include showrunner Jon Favreau, Jurassic World star Bryce Dallas Howard, Dope's Rick Famuyiwa, Ant-Man's Peyton Reed and Alita: Battle Angel's Robert Rodriguez, as well as Weathers doing double duty on-screen and off. If you're missing Star Wars on the big screen, don't spend too long stressing. Like any good rebel, this franchise is destined to keep returning. After introducing the world to new lightsaber-wielding characters, farewelling old favourites and delving into stellar side stories for five years straight between 2015–19, more Star Wars movies are planned, because of course they are — but wannabe Jedis won't be watching them just yet. Check out the latest trailer for The Mandalorian below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICuqzhViWAI The Mandalorian's second season hits Disney+ on Friday, October 30. FYI, this story includes some affiliate links. These don't influence any of our recommendations or content, but they may make us a small commission. For more info, see Concrete Playground's editorial policy. Top image: Disney+
Prepare to see some very fashionable pups strolling the streets of Australia, because instantly recognisable fashion label Gorman has launched its latest line of limited edition dog coats. What's more — as part of a second collaboration with Guide Dogs Australia — those new threads will have their wearers looking good for a very good cause. All profits will go towards providing extra support and boost awareness for the life-changing organisation. The quilted dog jackets are available in three different exclusive Gorman prints — named Emoji, River of Love, and Camo — and four sizes, ensuring pups big and small can look the goods. Each features a polyester shell, cotton lining and adjustable velcro straps for the perfect fit. And in excellent news for humans who want a piece of the action, the line also includes matching water-resistant raincoats for the lesser species. Just imagine how many looks you and your fluffball will get down at the dog park. Gorman's latest Guide Dogs Australia range is available online and at Gorman stores nationwide. Prices start at $39. Image: @spencerthechow and @frankiethelilsausage via Instagram.
When David Bowie starred in 1976's The Man Who Fell to Earth, playing an alien being who crash lands on our planet, it became one of the musician's iconic on-screen roles. It's also one that he returned to nearly four decades later, in a fashion — co-writing the musical Lazarus, as inspired by the Walter Tevis novel that the sci-fi film was based on. Written with playwright Enda Walsh, and one of Bowie's final projects before his passing in January 2016, Lazarus opened off-Broadway in December 2015. The production made the jump to London in 2017 and, in 2019, it'll bring its otherworldly story — and its soundtrack of 18 Bowie tracks — to Australia. The first show announced for The Production Company's 2019 season, Lazarus will make its Aussie debut between May 18 and June 9, hitting the stage at Arts Centre Melbourne. While local cast details won't be revealed until February 19, when ticketing details will also be unveiled, the original production was a suitably star-studded affair. Dexter's Michael C. Hall followed in Bowie's footsteps in the part of Thomas Jerome Newton, while Fargo's Cristin Milioti played the alien's assistant. Those eager for a date with this starman — and to start loving the alien, again — can expect a sequel of sorts to The Man Who Fell to Earth. The enigmatic Newton remains on earth, unable to die; however the arrival of another lost soul might offer the solution that he's been looking for. As for the familiar songs that this story plays out to, it's basically a best-of catalogue of Bowie's greatest hits. 'Heroes', 'Changes', 'Life on Mars?', 'The Man Who Sold the World' and 'Sound and Vision' all feature — as do four of the star's final recordings, including the title track 'Lazarus'. Lazarus will hit the Arts Centre Melbourne stage from May 18 to June 9, 2019. Ticketing details will be available from February 19, 2019 — to sign up for the wait list, visit lazarusthemusical.com.au.
How does an object change once it's presented on a plinth in a museum? How does a pile of bones differ from a crowbar, a trio of glass vessels, or a nude, when each is placed on the same simple white cube and viewed from a uniform angle? These are questions raised by New York-based artist and photographer Simon Harsent’s latest series, White Cube, a meditation on both stillness and change. In Harsent’s own words, "I'm quite intrigued by how keeping a locked-off camera position but changing a single element in a photograph can change perception, ideas and assumptions." A successful photographer working in advertising, Harsent has long been fascinated with change. A decade ago in the series Salt Moon his camera remained in a fixed position, capturing the moonlit ocean on a slow exposure. Approaching the theme of change from another angle, 2009's Melt is a spectacular landscape series capturing the slow decay of icebergs. So how did the artist decide what items to present on the austere white cube? Harsent says they were selected "based on what I thought they could achieve in both their aesthetic appeal and their ability to offer up a myriad of options of stories; not in a literal sense, but each object could potentially have a story behind it. After all, most things in museums are just objects with a history, so by replacing the object each time, a new story is potentially conceived." Historical readings and assumptions collide in possibly the most loaded image of White Cube, a beautiful nude black woman relaxing on the cube as though she were just another museum artefact. How did she enter the mix? After shooting the objects, Harsent wanted to add a human element. "At one point I was thinking of having someone’s body painted like a statue, but I felt that was the wrong thing to do, and I decided to shoot the girl as she is in the final image." As with the rest of this series, the photograph's meaning is supplied by you. What's inspiring Harsent right now in the art world? He's taken with abstract expressionism, and with Richard Serra's current show at the Gagosian in New York. "I love [Serra’s] use of space," he says. "It feels like you are walking in a three-dimensional Rothko painting." He also enjoyed the Richard Avedon exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. "The one thing that struck me were the imperfections in the images that make them so special. There is one image in particular of Bjork where you can see an impression that stockings she must have been wearing has left on her legs. Today that most likely would have been retouched out by an art director and in doing so, the image would have lost the most valuable thing in it." You can view the White Cube series in full and more of Simon Harsent's work on POOL Collective's fancy app, downloadable from iTunes. White Cube is on display at The Pool Collective Redux exhibition at The Black Eye Gallery, 138 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, Sydney, from December 5 to 23.
When they're done well, focus on good recipes and great conversation, and actually step you through the culinary process, cooking shows remain one of the best factual TV genres there is. Fancy all of the above, plus celebrities? That's Netflix's new series, The Chef Show. Just launched on the streaming platform, the show stars actor/director Jon Favreau and chef Roy Choi, who first worked together on the aptly titled film Chef. This time around, they're forgoing fiction for reality, taking viewers through their favourite dishes and techniques, and celebrating their shared love of food. Each episode features a different theme — in one, the duo smoke brisket in Texas with pitmaster Aaron Franklin; in another, they pay tribute to the late Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold. Given Favreau's career both on-screen and off, and his connection with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the series' high-profile guests are also a significant drawcard. On the guest list: Robert Downey Jr, Tom Holland, Gwyneth Paltrow, MCU producer Kevin Feige and Avengers' directors the Russo brothers. Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez doesn't have a Marvel connection, but he also pops up. The mood is relaxed but informative — like sitting down for a leisurely dinner chat, which also happens on-screen. A word of warning: if you watch the series on an empty stomach, prepare to feel rather hungry. Check out the trailer below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPtPs22gtOA The eight-episode first season of The Chef Show is now available to stream on Netflix.
Live tunes. Folks in the know unpacking everything from music and film to gaming and technology. Movies and TV shows to watch. Buttons to mash. Parties to hang out at. New favourite bands to be found. 2025 will mark the third year that SXSW Sydney brings all of the above together, and its lineup keeps growing. The event's music festival started dropping acts and speakers earlier in the year. It has just announced plenty more. Rashmeet Kaur, Vandelux, The Thing and August Wahh are the latest names on the bill between Monday, October 13–Sunday, October 19 in the Harbour City. So are Tenxi & Jemsii, Holly Hebe, Munan and Yasmina Sadiki. A huge 62 acts have joined the lineup in this round, with Bump2Soul, Charlotte OC, DC Maxwell, DOOR PLANT, EZUZ, 花溪 Flowerstream, Holy Void, Jasmine Thompson, MANAGONA草本藥師, No Life, Puff Punch, RESORT, Rovv, SHN, Sir Echo, Thy Howler, Tripov, Virgin Vacation and Womb among the international contingent. Also taking to the stage during 2025's SXSW Sydney: everyone from Beryl, C.O.F.F.I.N, Denzel Kennedy, Geography and Hey, Love to Last Quokka, Lyric, Mariae Cassandra, Robert Baxter, Sesame Girl and Ullah, and more. In total, this year's fest is due to feature more than 300 music performances, which means that this roster of talents is only going to grow. Already named in the past reveal: Jasmine 4.t, Freak Slug and Ristband + Pivots from the UK; Slowwves from Thailand; Japan's Suichu Spica 水中スピカ; New Zealand's Serebii and Tusekah; and Cardinals from Ireland; and Autralia's Jamaica Moana, JJ4K, RICEWINE, Sacred Hearts, Swapmeet and BADASSMUTHA. After the 2025 SXSW Sydney Music Festival speaker lineup initially advised that music supervisor Jen Malone, an alum of Euphoria, Yellowjackets, Wednesday, Atlanta, Mr & Mrs Smith, Dark Matter, The Umbrella Academy, The Penguin, Overcompensating and Sirens, would get chatting — plus Dr Marcus Collins, Beyoncé's former Digital Strategy Director — it too has boosted its list. Rachel So, Festival Manager at Goldenvoice, which is behind Coachella and Stagecoach, is among those who'll be part of the discussions. So are Warner Music Korea's Director of Domestic Marketing Stacy Nam, BandLab's Head of Communications & Creator Insights Dani Deahl, Amazon Music's of Label Relations and Marketing ANZ Chantelle Georgiou, Warp Publishing Director and Heard & Seen Founder Theo Seffusatti, and others. "The breadth of talent joining SXSW Sydney this year speaks to our growing role as the premier destination for music discovery and professional development in the Asia Pacific," said SXSW Sydney's Head of Music Claire Collins, unveiling the fest's latest additions. [caption id="attachment_1009884" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Paul McMillan[/caption] "With some of the world's most-respected talent buyers and industry leaders in attendance, SXSW Sydney has become a truly global meeting point — a place where careers are launched, collabs take shape and real deals are done," Collins continued. So far, SXSW Sydney has also revealed that there'll be more free programming, and named other speakers from an array of fields. Given that the full fest will span 1600-plus sessions, including 550 conference and professional development sessions, 90-plus movie screenings and over 150 games, keep watching this space for more announcements. SXSW Sydney 2025 runs from Monday, October 13–Sunday, October 19 at various Sydney venues. Head to the SXSW Sydney website for further details. Top image: Jess Gleeson.
Since 2005, Northcote Social Club has been known as a spot for bands, beers and big nights — and this winter, it'll be marking two decades as a key destination in Melbourne's live music scene with an appropriately massive birthday blowout. On Monday, June 30, the northside hotspot is kicking off a stacked birthday program dubbed 20 Gigs for 20 Years, with two months of shows and parties featuring some of the artists and communities who have helped to shape the venue's story so far. Expect live sets from favourites like Kingswood, Nai Palm, Augie March, Briggs' new band Big Noter (pictured below) and heaps more, as well as curated takeovers by PBS, Northside Records, Collective Artists and Poison City Records. The celebrations will conclude with a huge closing party on Friday, August 29 — the lineup for that night is still under wraps, but no doubt the venue will officially enter its third decade with a serious bang. And because Northcote Social Club has always been about community as much as chords, it's inviting anyone who's enjoyed a drink or a dance floor moment to drop a note or a photo into its front-bar letterbox — and by sharing your memory of the venue, you can win free tickets, a food and bev voucher, or a merch pack. Plus, anyone who buys a ticket to any of the 20th anniversary shows will go in the running to win the NSC Golden Ticket: 12 double passes to any shows over the next 12 months.
Tucked away off the dreaded staircase that connects Cookie, The Toff and Rooftop Bar, Metropolis is its own secret little world in the heart of the city. Specialising in graphic novels and pop culture titles, this is a bookshop specifically for creative types. Metropolis trades in weighty historical texts for entire shelves of erotica; in between the art books, film theory and local small press you can find an entire section dedicated to mid-century modern design. If you're chasing that perfect coffee table read, hunting a gift for someone who has everything or just prefer a few more pictures in your evening reads, Metropolis bookstore beckons. As any boutique book store should be, it's a tad hard to find, so best to use Google Maps to get to this one — unless you're well acquainted with Curtin House and its many levels. Trade in an afternoon of drinking at Rooftop Bar for some thinking downstairs in one of the best bookstores in Melbourne. You won't regret the swap.
Internationally celebrated fine dining restaurants, beery brunch spots, teeny tiny cafes and openair dining terraces by the sea — Perth's fast becoming one of Australia's food capitals. With over two million Perthites, it's no wonder Western Australia's capital has matured into a hub of wealth and high achievers. Perth is a food lover's city with a laidback attitude, full of enthusiastic folks in activewear — in fact, it's apparently acceptable to wear head-to-toe exercise clothes 24 hours a day in Perth with zero judgment. Think of Perth like San Diego — a sprawled out city with pockets of creativity and sunshine for days. As one of our favourite long weekenders, we thought it time to share the love. You'll need a thick wallet, an empty stomach, an explorative mindset and an Uber account (taxis aren't exactly flowing in Perth). Grab a cross-country flight (around five to six hours) on Thursday night then take these cues for the best long weekend in pretty little Perth. [caption id="attachment_621562" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Petition.[/caption] EAT AND DRINK The benefits of flying to Perth include gaining time which ultimately means, double breakfast and double dinner. It's the food, wine and beer scene in this city that never disappoints. You thought Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane were hard to please? Perth boasts an exceptional quota of local coffee and food snobs with high expectations. Start your days strong with breakfast or brunch at Gordon Street Garage in East Perth, Petition Kitchen, Tiisch, Post, or La Veen in Perth city. If you're more of a long mac kinda person, Telegram, Saint Larry, Small Print, Max + Sons, Lowdown and Mo Espresso have you covered for a takeaway before you start your adventures. In the 'burbs, you want to head to Pixel Coffee Brewers in Leederville, Hylin in West Leederville or Mary Street Bakery in Highgate for epic baked goods to match your mug o' caffeinated magic. [caption id="attachment_621569" align="alignnone" width="1920"] The Shorehouse.[/caption] By about midday, the sun has fully occupied Perth so you want to sit outside near a beach and enjoy those lunchtime rays that Melburnians dream of. Bread in Common in Fremantle, Bib & Tucker on Leighton Beach, Il Lido in Cottesloe, The Shorehouse in Swanbourne and Kailis Trigg Beach are a sure thing to a light tan while you indulge in Western Australian seafood and Semillon. Happy hour begins rather early in Perth and it seems customary to head to Little Creatures Brewery in Fremantle for a pale ale with a side of hand-cut fries. Heading up the Indian Ocean you also can't go past the infamous Ocean Beach Hotel on Cottesloe Beach. Not many places in the world provide that view matched with thongs and bathers being an acceptable dress attire, but it's Perth so it's all good. [caption id="attachment_621556" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Long Chim.[/caption] Roughly five years ago, Perth saw a significant shift in the dining scene. Maybe it was the mining boom, which saw wealth flow over the state, or perhaps it was Perth's maturity kicking in, but it's plain to see local restaurants and bars have stepped it up. There's an old meets new, East meets West theme clearly evident across the city's menus. Following news of Restaurant Amuse and Neil Perry's Rockpool closing down, many feared the worst for Perth's fine dining industry. But new kids on the block, Ku De Ta, Long Chim, Wildflower and Lulu La Delizia are not letting anything deter them. After dinner, if you're keen to continue the late night shenanigans, hidden CBD bar Helvetica, underground cocktail bar Alfred's Pizzeria, snug rooftop joint Mechanics Institute, rum speakeasy Sneaky Tony's, country-loving dive bar Alabama Song, whiskey den Varnish On King, all-day/night favourite Pica Bar, WA-proud, two-level classic bar Dominion League or these ten bars worth travelling for. [caption id="attachment_621536" align="alignnone" width="1920"] COMO The Treasury.[/caption] STAY Turns out Perth hosts the second best hotel in the world according to Conde Naste. Yep, it's true. It's called COMO The Treasury and it's absolutely stunning. If you're a high baller with cash money to burn, look no further. Wedged between the original 1875 brick and stonework sits a sculpture of polished opulence. With the likes of David Thompson's Long Chim setting up shop inside the Hotel, one never really has to leave. DO Like most Australian destinations, Perth's activities are highlighted in the sun, and no trip is complete without visiting Rottnest Island. Around 20-40 minutes from Perth is Western Australia's version of the Whitsundays (at just a fraction of the price). Think crystal blue water, powder white sand and no cars in sight. You can do Rotto in a day by hiring a bike and snorkel gear and wandering through the bays along the way. The Rotto Pub, Hotel Rottnest is where it's at for fish and chips while you take selfies with the Island's famous native little friend, the quokka. Get your return ferry to drop you at B Shed in Fremantle and explore the Maritime Museum, Fremantle Prison and Fremantle Markets. After Rotto, head for more of the Indian Ocean coastline from Leighton Beach up to Trigg. Hiring a stand-up paddleboard from Elemental SUP is a great place to start. Whether you're a beginner, keen to head out by yourself or try SUP yoga, the team has you sorted. For those a little less SUP and little more surf, there's plenty of boards to hire in Cottesloe, Scarborough and Trigg beach. For a change of pace, head to one of the world's largest inner city parks, King's Park. Hosting various hikes, botanical gardens, outdoor cinema and concerts, treetop walks, memorials and Indigenous history, the park is perfect for exploring for a few sunny hours. Take a picnic with you to savour while you overlook Perth city and the Swan River. [caption id="attachment_621560" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Petition.[/caption] LET'S DO THIS: WHEN TO GO Like the majority of Australian destinations, to get the best out of them, you want to visit during summer. With an annual average of 25 degrees though, Perth is a sure thing for eternal sunshine. It's from November to April when this city really turns it on so if you can manage a long weekend around the Perth Fringe Festival or the Perth International Arts Festival you'll see Perth in its shining glory.
One of Melbourne’s newest destination clubs is showing off what it can do with a massive NYE party. Open over three exapansive levels with luxurious bars, a big dance area and one of the best rooftops south of the river this will be a perfect spot to bring in the New Year. Each level of the complex has something going for it though our pick is to make your way to the rooftop well in advance for a great view of the midnight firework show over the city skyline. Tickets include cocktails, drinks, and canapés so the only thing you have to worry about is which cocktail to choose.
IMAX devotees aren't just big-screen obsessives. Rather, they're massive-screen obsessives. When a film is available in the largest possible format, only that will do. Everyone has a movie-loving friend that wouldn't see Oppenheimer anywhere else, or David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream, Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick before that. IMAX Melbourne's returning film festival is obviously for them — and everyone else as well. If you didn't head along in 2024, meet the Biggest Best IMAX Film Festival, an event dedicated to the biggest and best titles that the venue can possibly play on its 32-metre-wide by 23-metre-tall screen. It's the world's largest 1.43:1 cinema screen, and it's getting flickering with some of those aforementioned pictures and a heap more on various dates until the beginning of March 2025. Iconic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense is one must-see movie on the lineup, but it has plenty of impressive company. Animated masterpiece Akira, Titanic in 3D, Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Top Gun: Maverick, Australia's own Mad Max: Fury Road, sci-fi great The Matrix, the iconic Apocalypse Now: they're all on the program. So are a stack of Christopher Nolan films, such as Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, plus the full Dark Knight trilogy, all in IMAX 1570 (the highest resolution available, going up to 16K, with Melbourne the only place in the country that can show it). Or, catch a double of Dune and Dune: Part Two, then go blue with Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water. Of course 2001: A Space Odyssey is on the list as well — it has to be.
Back in 2014, when Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's vampire sharehouse mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows first reached cinemas, it had audiences around the globe in stitches over bloodsuckers. That was a wonderful feat, and so is everything that's followed — aka the What We Do in the Shadows Universe. If comic-book characters can have interconnected on-screen realms that spin multiple stories within the same fictional plane, then so can comedic vampires, of course. And, What We Do in the Shadows has kept delivering over the past few years. First came New Zealand-made TV series Wellington Paranormal, which stuck with the movie's cops (Mike Minogue and Karen O'Leary) as they keep investigating the supernatural. Also, there's the glorious What We Do in the Shadows television show. Turning a beloved film into a TV program doesn't always result in small-screen magic, but it worked for fellow movie-to-television vampire series Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and it works again here. In the Staten Island household where vamps Nandor (Kayvan Novak, Cruella), Laszlo (Matt Berry, Toast of London and Toast of Tinseltown) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga) all live, plus energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch, The Office) and Nandor's familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen, Werewolves Within), slayers have even staked a claim in the story. There's much, much more to the Shadows television spinoff than that — and plenty to laugh at as well. And, the just-dropped trailer for the show's fourth season promises plenty of giggles. Also, there's a vampire disco dance-off when the series' main figures hit the club. When the original film arrived in cinemas, we all instantly yearned for more, which this American spinoff has been delivering in just as smart, silly and hilarious a fashion as its big-screen predecessor. That's why it just keeps coming back again and again — as the undead tend to — with season four due to start in the US on Tuesday, July 12. Fingers crossed that What We Do in the Shadows' latest episodes show up Down Under around the same time, which they usually do. For now, here's the trailer — neon hues, Boney M's 'Rasputin' and Matt Berry being as Matt Berry as always all included: What We Do in the Shadows' fourth season starts streaming in the US on Tuesday, July 12. We'll update you with release dates Down Under when they're confirmed.
Ice cream maker-turned-activist Ben & Jerry's is once again taking its frozen treats into the political realm. In the past, the much-loved ice cream (or lack thereof) was used to support marriage equality. Now, it'll become a platform for taking action on climate change with the new limited-edition flavour, Gimme S'More Renewables. The flavour's launch corresponds with the global Rise For Climate Day on Saturday, September 8, and will be available in Ben & Jerry's stores for just one day, and while supplies last. All proceeds will be donated to the company's long-term climate activism partners, 350.org Australia. On the day, fifty marches and picnics are scheduled to take place across Australia — you can find the closest event to you here. Ben & Jerry's has also sent personalised pints of Gimme S'More Renewables to federal and state politicians, acting as a direct call on Australian leaders to accelerate renewable energy and commit to a fossil-fuel-free world. In a show of good faith, the company has committed to being carbon positive and using only renewable resources by 2030. Plus, its 2020 deadline for using renewable electricity sources and eliminating coal from its energy mix is just around the corner. All Ben & Jerry's shops are currently powered by Powershop, an electricity provider that is 100 percent carbon neutral. If you need more than the drought and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef to convince you to get involved, the Gimme S'More Renewables sounds pretty damn tasty, too — a combination of marshmallow ice cream, chocolate cookies, Graham cracker swirls and fudge flakes. Ben & Jerry's limited-edition Gimme S'More Renewables will be available at all Ben & Jerry's Scoop Shops on Saturday, September 8. Find your closest one here.
Taco Bell, Wahlburgers, Five Guys and Wendy's all did it. Now, Chuck E Cheese is as well. Big-name American food chains keep making the leap to Australia, with this US restaurant-slash-entertainment centre brand first announcing its Down Under plans in 2024, and now backing it up by confirming that it'll launch in 2025. Yes, Charles Entertainment Cheese is heading this way, ready to delight kids, families and Australian adults who've always wanted the Chuck E Cheese experience. The children's birthday-party go-to is set to open its first Aussie venue in the coming months, in Perth. Exactly where in the Western Australian capital will be revealed in April. Chuck E Cheese's jump Down Under is a result of the WA-based Royale Hospitality Group signing a master franchise partnership for the country, adding to a stable that also includes Outback Jack's and Milky Lane. It's helping extend the chain as it closes in on five decades of existence — launching in 1977 — and as Asia and Europe also become a global focus. On offer: the place to eat slices, play games and watch animatronics that's been parodied in the likes of Five Nights at Freddy's and Willy's Wonderland, but obviously without the horror. And yes, that spans the company's characters. Yes, Charles Entertainment Cheese is Chuck E Cheese's mouse mascot's full name. Patrons can look forward to pizza, arcade games, climbing walls, an interactive dance floor and other play areas, plus VIP birthday party rooms and a space for parents to kick back sans kids. On the menu, smoothies and milkshakes will also be a feature, as will healthy options. "Perth has a strong culture for family entertainment, so bringing Chuck E Cheese to Australia is incredibly exciting — we can't wait for families to experience the fun, games and great food that have made it famous around the world," said Royale Hospitality Group General Manager Christian Beaden, announcing that Perth will play host to the chain's first Aussie store. If you live elsewhere around the nation, you'll need to keep waiting to find out when you'll be able to take your nieces and nephews to Chuck E Cheese in other Australian cities. Chuck E Cheese will start opening in Australia in 2025, starting in Perth, but exactly when and where hasn't yet been revealed — keep an eye on the chain's website, and we'll update you with more details when they're announced.
What had you done with your life by the time you were 22? For most of us, it didn't include training abroad, publishing a best-selling cookbook, opening multiple businesses and competing in a huge televised competition. But it is just some of what Morgan Hipworth has already achieved before even getting close to his mid-20s. The Aussie-born, French-trained pâtissier already has two Morgan Bistro sites in Melbourne selling his famed doughnuts alongside a heap of other sweet treats. In 2023, he starred in Dessert Masters, competing with some of the country's top pastry chefs. And now he's tackling the all-day dining scene in Fitzroy with his new restaurant Maven by Morgan. For this venture, Hipworth is joined by co-head chef Daniel Neytha (ex-Lona Misa), who he's worked with to create an all-day dining menu that champions both European and South American cuisines. All the Aussie brunch favourites feature on the menu from Friday–Sunday, including avo on toast, eggs benny and chilli eggs. But standing out among these options is the duck and waffle. Hipworth and Neytha put a crispy duck leg, fried egg and fermented ginger and honey glaze on top of a crunchy sweet potato waffle for those seeking a less traditional brunch dish (and you'll be well rewarded for your moxy). Come dinner time, from Tuesday–Saturday Maven By Morgan guests can get around a selection of small and large dishes made for sharing. Neytha's South American touches shine through in dishes like the slow-roasted lamb shoulder paired with roasted eggplants and a vibrant salsa verde and the market fish ceviche served with potato puree and corn salsa. More Euro-centric bites include the pork cotoletta and the pistachio and zucchini pesto pasta that comes with squash and stracciatella. Pair these with a tight selection of European and Aussie wines, some signature cocktails and a stack of spirits and beer. And this wouldn't be a Hipworth venture without banging desserts. There's a classic Basque cheesecake and roasted fig and apple frangipane tart, plus a decadent tableside-served Biscoff tiramisu. But Maven by Morgan highlights how Hipworth has no desire to be seen as purely a pastry chef. At 22, he's already looking to the future and expanding on his brand. We're intrigued to see what he's got up his sleeves for us next.
Wednesday nights in Melbourne mean one thing: hitting up the Queen Victoria Market's usual midweek — and after-dark — offering. During winter, it celebrates the frosty season with an appropriate spread. Across spring this year, it's been oozing Euro vibes. Now, with the warm weather upon us for another year, QVM is bringing back its legendary Summer Night Market. Just like last year's Summer Night Market, the event is returning every Wednesday from late November till the middle of March: from November 22–March 13, to be exact. That means that Melburnians can look forward to a fresh 16-week run, and to a heap of places to browse, buy from, eat at and sip drinks from, with more than 100 different shops, stalls and bars on the lineup. Each week, the Summer Night Market will feature a mouthwatering lineup of food vendors slinging street eats from every corner of the globe. We're talking Mozzaburgers (they're burgers made with mozzarella cheese buns) from That's Amore Cheese, sticky chicken and beef ribs from Rib-a-licious, authentic Filipino street eats from HOY PINOY and Black Forest pavs from Pavlova. It's Off Tap is also making its Summer Night Market debut, serving up its chocolate-coated strawberries to the Melbourne masses. To wash it all down and quench your summer thirst, you'll find no less than six dedicated festival bars — one focusing on mojitos, another doing sangria and a Brick Lane Beer Garden all included. As always, there'll be a program of live, local tunes to soundtrack your food-focused wanderings, including DJ sets and roving performers. From November 22–December 20, the Queen Vic Market's Summer Night Market will also be going full Christmas with carollers, roaming Santas and a Christmas tree forest. DJs will also be blasting Christmas classics during this period — for better or worse, Mariah Carey's 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' is sure to be featured while you eat and drink under the stars. And, for a little midweek shopping action, see: the diverse range of artisan maker stalls, which will be brimming with an array of handmade gifts, homewares, fashion and more. The Queen Victoria Market 2023–24 Summer Night Market will run from 5–10pm every Wednesday from November 22–March 13 (excluding December 27). Find it at the Queen Victoria Market, corner of Queen and Therry Streets, Melbourne. More info can be found at the venue's website.
19 isn't typically a huge year for a birthday bash, but it's a pretty big deal for a laneway bar like Section 8. The legendary outdoor converted container bar isn't doing cakes or candles to celebrate this special occasion — it's reviving its crowd-favourite Beach Party instead. For the seven days between Monday, February 24, and Sunday, March 2, you'll find a slice of coastal paradise on the edge of Chinatown. It's not just sand and beachy decorations by the talents at Saoko Collective that will greet partygoers. Section 8 has a track record of going all out. The event is sponsored by Skrewball Whiskey, Hop Nation and Heaps Normal, so beverages and cocktails of all flavours and ABVs will be on offer. [caption id="attachment_849269" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Leilani Bale[/caption] Plus, an absolutely jam-packed lineup of 30 DJs are taking part in the event, including Mrs Wallace, Sista Sara, Milk Bar, Afrodesia, Soul Sessions and many more. As well as banging live music, every day of the week will bring a different activity: basketball shootouts on Monday, jazz on the sand on Wednesday, soul sessions and free chips on Saturday — you get the idea. That's not even the best part. All of the festivities are free all week long. The music kicks off nightly at 6pm, except on Saturday and Sunday which will see the tunes start spinning from 3pm. The Section 8 Beach Party will run daily from Monday, February 24 to Sunday, March 2. Entry is free, visit the website for more information.
Something delightful has been happening in cinemas in some parts of the country. After numerous periods spent empty during the pandemic, with projectors silent, theatres bare and the smell of popcorn fading, picture palaces in many Australian regions are back in business — including both big chains and smaller independent sites in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. During COVID-19 lockdowns, no one was short on things to watch, of course. In fact, you probably feel like you've streamed every movie ever made, including new releases, Studio Ghibli's animated fare and Nicolas Cage-starring flicks. But, even if you've spent all your time of late glued to your small screen, we're betting you just can't wait to sit in a darkened room and soak up the splendour of the bigger version. Thankfully, plenty of new films are hitting cinemas so that you can do just that — and we've rounded up, watched and reviewed everything on offer this week. BERGMAN ISLAND Each filmmaker sits in the shadows of all who came before them — and as cinema's history lengthens, so will those penumbras. With Bergman Island, French writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve doesn't merely ponder that idea; she makes it the foundation of her narrative, as well a launching pad for a playful and resonant look at love, work and the creative wonders our minds conjure up. Her central duo, two filmmakers who share a daughter, literally tread where the great Ingmar Bergman did. Visiting Fårö, the island off Sweden's southeastern coast that he called home and made his base, Chris (Vicky Krieps, Old) and Tony Sanders (Tim Roth, The Misfits) couldn't escape his imprint if they wanted to. They don't dream of trying, as they're each searching for as much inspiration as they can find; however, the idea of being haunted by people and their creations soon spills over to Chris' work. Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage has already been remade, albeit in a miniseries that arrived on the small screen a couple of months after Bergman Island premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival — but across one half of Hansen-Løve's feature, that title would fit here as well. Her resume has long been filled with intimate looks at complicated relationships, including in 2009's Father of My Children and 2011's Goodbye First Love, with her movies both peering deeply and cutting deep as they unfurl the thorny intricacies of romance. Accordingly, when Chris and Tony find themselves sleeping in the bedroom where Bergman shot the original Scenes From a Marriage, it's a loaded and layered moment several times over. That said, the thing about willingly walking in someone else's footsteps is that you're not bound to taking the exact same path — as Bergman Island's characters learn, and as the filmmaker that's brought them to the screen clearly already knows. Turning in finessed and thoughtful performances, Krieps and Roth bring a lived-in dynamic to the film's first key couple, with the chaos that swirls from being in the same line of work but chasing disparate aims not just flowing but bubbling in their paired scenes. He's the kind of Bergman fan that's adamant about going on the Bergman safari, a real-life thing that all visitors can do, for instance, while she prefers being shown around informally by young film student Hampus (acting debutant Hampus Nordenson). But their Fårö escapades only fill half of Bergman Island, because the movie also brings Chris' budding script to life. She tells Tony the tale, seeking his assistance in working out an ending, but he's too immersed in Bergman worship to truly pay attention. The feature itself, Hansen-Løve and the audience all savour the details, though — eagerly so. There, in this film-within-a-film, 28-year-old director Amy (Mia Wasikowska, Blackbird) visits an island, too — "a place like this," Chris advises, and one that visibly resembles Fårö. She dances to ABBA to cement the Swedish ties, and also spends her time on the locale's shores wading through matters of art and the heart. The catalyst for the latter: her ex Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie, The Worst Person in the World). They're both attending a wedding of mutual friends, and their lengthy, passionate and volatile history quickly pushes to the fore. While they've each moved on, they're also forever connected, especially when placed in such close quarters. Accordingly, that tumultuous relationship is as bedevilled by other creative endeavours, and also by the thrall of history, as Chris' quest to put pen to paper. And, via the movie-inside-a-movie concept, there's an evocative sense of mirroring that couldn't spring any firmer from Bergman himself. Read our full review. WASH MY SOUL IN THE RIVER'S FLOW A silent hero and a rowdy troublemaker. That's what Ruby Hunter calls Archie Roach, her partner in life and sometimes music, then characterises herself. She offers those words casually, as if she's merely breathing, with an accompanying smile and a glint in her eyes as she talks. They aren't the only thoughts uttered in Wash My Soul in the River's Flow, which intersperses concert and rehearsal clips with chats with Hunter and Roach, plus snippets of biographical details from and recollections about their lives as intertitles, and then majestic footage of the winding Murray River in Ngarrindjeri Country, where Hunter was born, too. Still, even before those two-word descriptions are mentioned, the film shows how they resonate within couple's relationship. Watching their dynamic, which had ebbed and flowed over three-plus decades when the movie's footage was shot in 2004, it's plain to see how these two icons of Australian music are dissimilar in personality and yet intertwine harmoniously. Every relationship is perched upon interlocking personalities: how well they complement each other, where their differences blend seamlessly and how their opposing traits spark challenges in the best possible ways. Every song, too, is a balance of disparate but coordinated pieces. And, every ecosystem on the planet also fits the bill. With Hunter and Roach as its focus, Wash My Soul in the River's Flow contemplates all three — love, music and Country — all through 2004 concert Kura Tungar — Songs from the River. Recorded for the documentary at Melbourne's Hamer Hall, that gig series interlaced additional parts, thanks to a collaboration with Paul Grabowsky's 22-piece Australian Art Orchestra — and the movie that producer-turned-writer/director Philippa Bateman makes of it, and about two Indigenous stars, their experience as members of Australia's Stolen Generations, their ties to Country and their love, is equally, gloriously and mesmerisingly multifaceted. When is a concert film more than a concert film? When it's Wash My Soul in the River's Flow, clearly, which is named for one of Kura Tungar's tracks. Bateman could've just used her recordings of the legendary show, which won the 2005 Helpmann Award for Best Australian Contemporary Concert, and given everyone who wasn't there the chance to enjoy an historic event — and to bask in the now-late Hunter's on-stage glories more than a decade after her 2010 passing — but that was clearly just the starting point for her movie. With Roach as a producer, the documentary presents each of its songs as a combination of five key elements, all weaved together like the feather flower-dotted, brightly coloured headpiece that Hunter wears during the performance. With each tune, the film repeats the pattern but the emotion that comes with it inherently evolves, with the result akin to cycling through the earth's four seasons. First, a title appears on-screen, overlaid across breathtakingly beautiful images of the Murray and its surroundings, and instantly steeping every song in a spectacular place. From there, the Kura Tungar rendition of each tune segues into practice sessions with Grabowsky and the AAO of the same track, plus both text and on-the-couch chatter between Hunter and Roach that speaks to the context of, meaning behind and memories tied to each piece. Hunter's 'Daisy Chains, String Games and Knuckle Bones', which springs from her childhood, gets that treatment. Roach's unforgettable 'Took the Children Away' does, too. 'Down City Streets', as written by Hunter and recorded by Roach, also joins the lineup. The list goes on, and the power that each song possesses alone — which, given the talent and topics involved, is immense — only grows when packaged in such a layered manner. Read our full review. THE SOUVENIR: PART II In showbusiness, nepotism is as inescapable as movies about movies. Both are accounted for in The Souvenir: Part II. But when talents as transcendent as Honor Swinton Byrne, her mother Tilda Swinton and writer/director Joanna Hogg are involved — with the latter working with the elder Swinton since her first short, her graduation piece Caprice, back in 1986 before Honor was even born — neither family ties nor filmmaking navel-gazing feel like something routine. Why this isn't a surprise with this trio is right there in the movie's name, after the initial The Souvenir proved such a devastatingly astute gem in 2019. It was also simply devastating, following an aspiring director's romance with a charismatic older man through to its traumatic end. Both in its masterful narrative and its profound impact, Part II firmly picks up where its predecessor left off. In just her third film role — first working with her mum in 2009's I Am Love before The Souvenir and now this — Swinton Byrne again plays 80s-era filmmaking student Julie Harte. But there's now a numbness to the wannabe helmer after her boyfriend Anthony's (Tom Burke, Mank) death, plus soul-wearying shock after discovering the double life he'd been living that her comfortable and cosy worldview hadn't conditioned her to ever expect. Decamping to the Norfolk countryside, to her family home and to the warm but entirely upper-middle-class, stiff-upper-lip embrace of her well-to-do parents Rosalind (Swinton, The French Dispatch) and William (James Spencer Ashworth) is only a short-term solution, however. Julie's thesis film still needs to be made — yearns to pour onto celluloid, in fact — but that's hardly a straightforward task. As the initial movie was, The Souvenir: Part II is another semi-autobiographical affair from Hogg, with Swinton Byrne slipping back into her on-screen shoes. This time, the director doesn't just dive into her formative years four decades back, but also excavates what it means to mine your own life for cinematic inspiration — aka the very thing she's been doing with this superb duo of features. That's what Julie does as well as she works on the film's film-within-a-film, sections of which play out during The Souvenir: Part II's running time and are basically The Souvenir. Accordingly, viewers have now spent two pictures watching Hogg's protagonist lives the experiences she'll then find a way to face through her art, all while Hogg moulds her two exceptional — and exceptionally intimate and thoughtful — movies out of that exact process. Julie's graduation project is also an escape, given it's patently obvious that the kindly, well-meaning but somehow both doting and reserved Rosalind and William have been pushed out of their comfort zone by her current crisis. Helping their daughter cope with her heroin-addicted lover's passing isn't something either would've considered might occur, so they natter away about Rosalind's new penchant for crafting Etruscan-style pottery instead — using small talk to connect without addressing the obvious, as all families lean on at some point or another. They provide financing for Julie's film, too, in what proves the easiest part of her concerted efforts to hop back behind the lens and lose herself in her work. Elsewhere, an array of doubt and questions spring from her all-male film-school professors, and the assistance she receives from her classmates is quickly steeped in rivalries, envy and second-guessing. Read our full review. FACING MONSTERS "If you want the ultimate, you've got to be willing to pay the ultimate price." Uttered by Patrick Swayze in 90s surfing action flick Point Break, that statement isn't directly quoted in Facing Monsters. Still, when it comes to the underlying idea behind those words — that anything at its absolute pinnacle comes at a cost, especially seeking bliss hanging ten on giant swells — this new Australian documentary unquestionably rides the same wave. Directed by Bentley Dean, and marking his first movie in cinemas since 2015 Oscar-nominee Tanna, the film focuses on Kerby Brown, the Aussie slab surfer who is at his happiest atop the biggest breakers possible. He's turned hunting them into his life's mission — think Point Break's 50-year storm, also set in Australia, but every time that Kerby hops on a board — and Facing Monsters commits that pursuit to celluloid. Helming solo unlike on Tanna — which he co-directed with Martin Butler, as he did on prior documentaries Contact, First Footprints and A Sense of Self as well — Dean understands three key aspects to Kerby's story. The thrills, the spectacle and the calm: they're all accounted for here, including simply in the astonishing imagery that fills the film. There's no shortage of talk in Facing Monsters; Kerby himself, his brother and frequent partner-in-surf Cortney, his partner Nicole Jardine, and his parents Glenn and Nola all chat happily. But this movie makes much of its impact, and captures plenty that's pivotal, all via its visuals alone. Cinematographer Rick Rifici has long shot the sea as if it's an otherworldly space, including while working as a camera operator on Storm Surfers, as a water cinematographer on Breath, and as the underwater camera operator on Dirt Music, and he's as as crucial here as Kerby. The long, wide, lingering image that begins the film is one such unforgettable moment — essential and exceptional, too. Kerby floats in a sea of lush but rippling pink, face to the sky, his board strapped to his leg. It's a near-supernatural sight, and a transcendent one, but amid the unshakeably striking beauty of the shot, uncertainty also loiters. An unspoken query, too: is this a picture of bliss or bleakness? Next comes a quick cut, letting Kerby's bloody face and bandaged head fill the the screen instead, and making it instantly clear that his love of riding big waves has physical and severe consequences. The gorgeous visions return from there, and the intimacy as well — the latter largely flowing from talk from this point forward — but Facing Monsters' first frames truly do say it all. Indeed, it's noticeable that the remainder of the movie feels like it's paddling after this opening sensation and atmosphere. Facing Monsters is a documentary about chasing, of course — waves, obsessions, addictions, demons, solace and happiness alike. The dangerous nature of slab surfing plays out like a quest as much as an adventure, driving Kerby ever since he and Cortney got bored with the swells at Kalbarri in Western Australia, where they grew up, then starting seeking out bigger and bigger possibilities. That's there in the chatter as well as the imagery, in a film that aims to convey the what and why behind its subject's choices through immersion first and foremost. It's fitting, then, that watching Facing Monsters sometimes resembles riding high — when its visuals express everything they need to — and sometimes floats in shallower waters. Ensuring that audiences share the awe and wonder that Kerby experiences on his board is easy with Rifici's astounding help; diving deeper into exactly what else makes its point of focus tick, and has through swirls of drugs and booze, life-threatening incidents in the surf, and becoming a father, is a far more evasive task. BOOK OF LOVE In 2018's The Nightingale, Sam Claflin gave the performance of his career so far while playing thoroughly against type. As a British lieutenant in colonial-era Tasmania, he terrorised the film's female protagonist to a nerve-rattlingly distressing degree — and his work, just like the phenomenal feature he's in, isn't easy to watch. Book of Love, his latest movie, couldn't be more different; however, Claflin's portrayal could use even a sliver of the commitment he demonstrated four years back. The film around him could, too. Here, he plays a floundering novelist who doesn't want to do a very long list of things, so it makes sense that he takes to the part with a dissatisfied attitude that drips with not only unhappiness, but pouting petulance. He's meant to be one of this dire rom-com's romantic leads, however, and he constantly looks like he'd rather be doing anything else. Author of The Sensible Heart, Claflin's Henry Copper is instantly as dour as his book sounds. It too is a romance, but he's proud of its sexlessness — to the point of boasting about it to bored would-be readers who definitely don't make a purchase afterwards. He's also seen using his novel as a pick-up line early in the movie, and that goes just as badly. In fact, his whole career seems to be a shambles, and the prim-and-proper Brit can't understand why. But he's also surprised when he's told that his latest has become a bestseller in Mexico, and he's hardly thrilled about the whirlwind promotional tour his brassy agent (Lucy Punch, The Prince) swiftly books him on. Upon arrival, where his local translator Maria Rodríguez (My Heart Goes Boom!) doubles as his minder, he's visibly displeased about everything he's asked to do — more so when he discovers that she's taken the liberty to spice up his work. Of course, Maria's revisions — a wholesale rewrite that plunges The Sensible Heart into erotic page-turner territory — are the sole reason that Mexican women are lining up at Henry's events to throw themselves at him. And with both his British-based and Mexican agents adamant that his publicity tour must go on, he's forced to grin and bear that truth as they take a road trip across the country. Henry and Maria are a chalk-and-cheese pair in a host of other ways, naturally, but apparently sparks can't help igniting in this contrived scenario. It's telling that BuzzFeed Studios is behind the film, the site earns a mention in the movie and its plot feels like a gif-heavy listicle from the outset. Indeed, based on how slight and stereotypical every aspect of Book of Love proves, writer/director Analeine Cal y Mayor (La Voz de un Sueño) and co-writer David Quantick (Veep) don't appear to have spent much time fleshing anything out beyond that potential starting point. Tired, not wired: that's the end result, including Book of Love's place in the current literary-focused subgenre of romantic flicks that's also spawned the 50 Shades movies, the After films and fellow forgettable 2022 release The Hating Game. Claflin's patent disinterest is the least of the feature's troubles given that its storyline is nonsensical, there's no sign of chemistry between its leads, the dialogue couldn't be flatter and the travelogue setup has already been overdone. The charismatic Rodríguez certainly deserves better, even if no one else involved inspires the same description solely based on their efforts here. She's stuck playing a character that's been given as much depth and texture as a full stop — the archetype: feisty put-upon single mother with big dreams but crushing responsibilities — but she's also the only part of the movie that feels remotely real. OFF THE RAILS In need of a bland and derivative friends-on-holidays flick that's painted with the broadest of strokes? Keen to dive once more into the pool of movies about pals heading abroad to scatter ashes and simultaneously reflect upon their current lot in life? Fancy yet another supposedly feel-good film that endeavours to wring humour out of culture clashes between English-speaking protagonists and the places they visit? Yearning for more glimpses of thinly written women getting their grooves back and realising what's important on a wild Eurotrip? Call Off the Rails, not that anyone should. Coloured with every cliche that all of the above scenarios always throw up, and also covered from start to finish in schmaltz, it's a travel-themed slog that no one could want to remember. A grab bag of overdone tropes and treacly sentiment, it also doubles as an ode to the songs of Blondie, which fill its soundtrack — but even the vocal stylings of the great Debbie Harry can't breathe vibrancy into this trainwreck. Alongside its woeful been-there-done-that plot, its lack of personality, its yearning to be the next Mamma Mia! and all those Blondie tracks — the prominence of which makes zero sense given how briefly and haphazardly each song, hits and deeper cuts alike from a lengthy list, are deployed — Off the Rails does have another claim to fame to its name. The British film also marks the last on-screen appearance of Kelly Preston, who passed away in mid-2020; however, it isn't the swansong that any actor would want. Her involvement does give the movie's messages about making the most of one's time, embracing what you love and keeping in touch with the people who matter while you can a bittersweet tone, but not enough to wash away its mix of dullness and overdone mawkishness. Or, to invest depth into what's largely 94 minutes of middle-aged travellers arguing about anything and everything. Once close, Kate (Jenny Seagrove, Peripheral), Liz (Sally Phillips, Blinded by the Light) and Cassie (Preston, Gotti) now just call on big occasions — and even then, they're barely there for each other. But when fellow pal Anna dies, they reunite at her funeral, and are asked to carry out her final wish by her mother (Belfast's Judi Dench, in a thankless cameo). The task: catching a train across Europe, through Paris to Girona, Barcelona and Palma in Spain, to recreate a backpacking jaunt the four took decades earlier. Specifically, they're headed to La Seu, a cathedral with stained-glass windows that look particularly spectacular when the sun hits at the right time (the film calls it "god's disco ball"). Anna already bought their Interrail passes, and her 18-year-old daughter Maddie (Elizabeth Dormer-Phillips, Fortitude) decides she'll join the voyage, too. Amid the bickering, which fills most of debut feature director Jules Williamson's scenes and screenwriter Jordan Waller's dialogue, the usual antics all roll out. Old feuds are unearthed, transport often goes awry every which way it can and the main middle-aged trio cause middle-aged women problems (getting drunk, getting lost, causing a scene in a boutique, delivering a baby and the like). Menopause earns some discussion, romance also springs — which is where the always-welcome but underused Franco Nero, aka cinema's original Django, comes in — and life lessons are ultimately learned. If that sounds tediously stock-standard on paper, it certainly plays out that way in a sunnily shot but always plodding ostensible comedy. Few performances could improve this plight, and Off the Rails' happily one-note efforts can't either, especially when its most interesting character and corresponding portrayal — courtesy of Dormer-Phillips as Maddie — keeps being pushed aside. If you're wondering what else is currently screening in Australian cinemas — or has been lately — check out our rundown of new films released in Australia on November 4, November 11, November 18 and November 25; December 2, December 9, December 16 and December 26; January 1, January 6, January 13, January 20 and January 27; February 3, February 10, February 17 and February 24; and March 3. You can also read our full reviews of a heap of recent movies, such as Eternals, The Many Saints of Newark, Julia, No Time to Die, The Power of the Dog, Tick, Tick... Boom!, Zola, Last Night in Soho, Blue Bayou, The Rescue, Titane, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Dune, Encanto, The Card Counter, The Lost Leonardo, The French Dispatch, Don't Look Up, Dear Evan Hansen, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Lost Daughter, The Scary of Sixty-First, West Side Story, Licorice Pizza, The Matrix Resurrections, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Worst Person in the World, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, House of Gucci, The King's Man, Red Rocket, Scream, The 355, Gold, King Richard, Limbo, Spencer, Nightmare Alley, Belle, Parallel Mothers, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Belfast, Here Out West, Jackass Forever, Benedetta, Drive My Car, Death on the Nile, C'mon C'mon, Flee, Uncharted, Quo Vadis, Aida?, Cyrano, Hive, Studio 666, The Batman and Blind Ambition.
Well, Monopoly just took its reputation as the game that will destroy your family to the next level. HBO is teaming up with Hasbro for the version we've all been waiting for: Game of Thrones Monopoly. According to Mashable, the game has locked in a 2015 release — we're hoping most likely to coincide with the Season Five premiere in April. Instead of the usual boardwalks of Rich Uncle Pennybags, the board will take bloody, bloody real estate to the key spots of Westeros. Ditching the dog and thimble, GoT Monopoly will let you play as a direwolf, three-eyed raven, White Walker, dragon egg, crown, and of course, and Iron Throne. And you'll be building villages and keeps instead of houses and hotels. “The Iron Bank is the Iron Bank.” Coming in 2015, Monopoly #GameOfThrones edition: http://t.co/UBuXb0iqcc @usaopoly pic.twitter.com/fubi9rdgKz— Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) February 13, 2015 Hasbro haven't revealed the individual board spaces for the GoT edition. We're thinking King's Landing has a good chance of Mayfair, and we'd probably drop Craster's Keep on Old Kent Road. You'll likely be nabbing your Gold Dragons from the Iron Bank, and keeping everything crossed for a Get Out of The Wall Free Card. Game of Thrones Monopoly is set for release in 2015. Via Mashable.
By the time that 2024 is out, hopefully the Matildas will have Olympic gold medals from the Paris games. Sports fans, cross your fingers and toes now. But no matter how Australia's national women's soccer team fares midyear, the Tillies are set to score a bronze tribute to the squad before 2025 rolls in, with plans for Brisbane's ode to their 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup efforts progressing. Last year, after a whirlwind month of football that included the Matildas beating France in a stunning penalty shootout, and Sam Kerr kicking the goal of a lifetime in the semi-final loss to England, the Queensland Government announced that it would build a Matildas statue. The team will be immortalised in a bas-relief piece at the River City's Suncorp Stadium, where the epic match against France was played — was the Matildas' 3–2 loss to Nigeria in the group stage and 2–0 third-place playoff defeat by Sweden. The artwork will measure around six metres in width and two metres in height, with the Brisbane-based Urban Art Projects newly commissioned to deliver the sculpture. There's no exact date yet that the public piece will be unveiled, other than the end of 2024 — but you can factor seeing the celebration of Kerr, Ellie Carpenter, Mackenzie Arnold, Hayley Raso, Steph Catley, Katrina Gorry, Mary Fowler, Caitlin Foord and their teammates, and their history-making World Cup campaign, into your trips to the Milton stadium. Fans can expect "a high-quality, large-scale cast bronze bas-relief capturing an iconic moment of celebration from the tournament," says UAP Associate Paul Gurney, with the company employing "both robotic and hand-crafted techniques to achieve the players' likenesses in bronze". No Australian soccer team has made it as far into World Cup as the Matildas did in 2023 — not the Matildas themselves in the past, and not the Socceroos, either. Indeed, it's no wonder that their games kept smashing ratings records, with the England match becoming the country's most-watched TV program since 2001, and also likely ever. When the statue celebrating the Matildas is installed, it'll add both female and football representation to a site that currently features statues of rugby league stars Wally Lewis, Arthur Beetson, Darren Lockyer, Mal Meninga and Allan Langer, plus rugby union's John Eales. "In a nation that loves its sport, the Matildas were not only the most watched team on Australian television in 2023, their semi-final against England was the most watched event in Australian television history," said Queensland Minister for Women Shannon Fentiman. "They are inspiring women and girls to become more active and get involved in organised sport, and it is fantastic that their efforts will be recognised with a permanent tribute." Brisbane's new tribute at Suncorp Stadium celebrating the Matildas' 2023 Women's World Cup efforts is set to be installed by the end of 2024 — we'll update you when further details are announced.
Northside favourite ice creamery Billy Van Creamy is teaming up with Lovehoney for a two-day 'Lover's Scoop' pop-up in Brunswick, pairing libido-spiking ice cream with sex toys. Across Friday, October 10 and Saturday, October 11, the Sydney Road location will give away 600 free cones daily from 11am–10pm, with the first 50 people through the doors each day also receiving a free sex toy. Two limited-edition flavours have been created for the occasion — lavender and honey, and sumac and strawberry — both dipped in chocolate and served in a double cone designed for sharing. The activation comes off the back of new research showing more than half of Victorians report experiencing low libido, with married couples the most likely to be affected. Lovehoney sexologist Christine Rafe said the collaboration is about finding connection through small rituals. "Often it's the small, playful rituals that make the difference. It's why we've chosen natural aphrodisiac flavours such as honey, lavender, strawberry and sumac, a fun reminder that even something as simple as sharing an ice cream can help turn things back on," she said. Whether you're heading out on a date or looking to reconnect, the event is an invitation to mix pleasure with a little intimacy. Billy van Creamy x Lovehoney 'Lover's Scoop' runs Friday, October 10 and Saturday, October 11, from 11am–10pm at 146 Sydney Road, Brunswick.
At any given moment, finding a movie to watch isn't difficult. But there's a difference between pressing play on any old film that your streaming service of choice is throwing your way — new releases and classics alike — and feeling like you're discovering something that's truly special. Online film festivals have been playing in the latter space during the pandemic, and letting cinephiles enjoy that electric feeling that comes with giving yourself over to a gem of a feature. And, for two years in a row now, Melbourne's annual film fest has been as well. The Melbourne International Film Festival didn't intend to run solely online two years in a row. In 2020, it made the jump to digital by necessity. This year, it worked towards a triumphant return to cinemas — yes, to physical screenings — while also continuing to embrace the greater accessibility that virtual sessions provide. But this year's fest always had to have contingency plans in case outbreaks and lockdowns bubbled up again, which is exactly what's happened. So, MIFF is unleashing its magic solely online once more. Making movie buffs feel like they're getting swept up in the latest and greatest in international cinema is still on the agenda, though. You might be sitting on your couch instead of in your favourite seat right at the back of the Forum or Hoyts Central — and you might be elsewhere in the country, too, instead of making the trip to Melbourne for some wintry cinema fun — but MIFF hasn't stopped giving film lovers what they adore. Already, we've watched, reviewed and recommended ten must-sees on the festival's MIFF Play streaming platform; however, this 18-day fest has plenty more where they came from before it wraps up on Sunday, August 22. So, we've done the same with another ten films. Streaming a couple won't just help you feel like you're getting a MIFF experience, either, but it'll also support the fest during an obviously challenging time. RIDERS OF JUSTICE Few things will ever be better than seeing Mads Mikkelsen get day drunk and dance around while swigging champagne in an Oscar-winning movie. Yes, that's one fantastic film experience that 2021 has already delivered. But the always-watchable Danish star is equally magnetic in Riders of Justice, a revenge-driven comedy that's all about tackling your problems in a different and far less boozy way. After a train explosion taints his life with tragedy, dedicated solider Markus (Mikkelsen, Chaos Walking) heads home to be with his traumatised daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Pagten). Talking is her way of coping, but clamming up has always been his PTSD-afflicted modus operandi. Then statistician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, The Keeper of Lost Causes), his colleague Lennart (Lars Brygmann, The Professor and the Madman) and the computer-savvy Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro, The Kingdom) arrive at the grieving family's door with a theory: that the accident was anything but because mathematically it's just so unlikely to have occurred otherwise. As written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen (Men & Chicken) — and co-penned with Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair) — Riders of Justice takes a darkly comedic approach to its storyline, which is where its anarchic plot developments and witty dialogue come in. But this is also a film with a thoughtful and tender core, especially when it comes to men facing their troubles. It's set at the end of the year as well, so it counts as a screwball Christmas movie. ROSE: A LOVE STORY Less is more in survival thriller Rose: A Love Story — which is also a brooding horror movie, and yet doesn't feel the need to overplay its hand. This intimate British gem takes a familiar setup, bides its time building out its chosen world and revels in getting to know its two main characters, because their precarious relationship sits at the heart of the smartly written film. Living off the grid in a tree-lined patch of wilderness, the eponymous Rose (Sophie Rundle, Peaky Blinders) and her husband Sam (Matt Stokoe, Cursed) have clearly settled into their routine some time ago. They largely live off the land and pay one trusted acquaintance to bring them petrol for their generator, all so Rose can stay inside writing while Sam tends to chores outdoors. But she also needs his care, and needs the blood he collects via leeches — and when an injured teenager (Olive Gray, Save Me) literally stumbles upon their quiet abode, that part of their existence starts sparking questions. With its stripped-back way of unfurling its narrative, Rose: A Love Story leans heavily on Rundle and Stokoe's textured and compelling performances, which explore the stakes and sacrifices that come with love in every glance and gesture. Stokoe also wrote the script, but first-time feature filmmaker Jennifer Sheridan brings a canny eye to both warm and brutal moments alike, and to teasing out the complicated and fragile bond between this particular pair, as well as any duo in love. NIGHT OF THE KINGS Every movie aims to make its viewers feel as if they've stepped straight into its glistening frames. Rare is the film that genuinely manages that feat, though. Rarer still is a feature as vivid, immersive and engaging at every moment, and via every piece of sound and vision it thrusts at its audience, as Night of the Kings proves across its 93-minute running time. The second directorial effort from Ivorian filmmaker Philippe Lacôte (Run), this prison-set blend of drama, thrills and fantasy heads inside a Côte d'Ivoire jail surrounded by rainforest outside Abidjan. When a new inmate (debutant Bakary Koné) arrives, he's plunged straight into its chaotic depths; however, he also becomes a key player in its internal politics. Here, the inmates enforce their own order, including requiring their leader (Steve Tientcheu, Les Miserables) to take his own life if he can no longer fulfil his role. This incarcerated society also places great emphasis on one particular storyteller, a job that's soon bestowed upon its newest member. So, the fresh face dubbed the prison's 'Roman' spins a tale that jumps through the past, from 19th-century Africa to more recent bloodshed, with his words leaving his fellow detainees hanging — but if he can't make his yarn last all night, he too will meet his end. Night of the Kings sits right on the precipice of myth and grit, and of history and fantasy, and it's as inventive as it is gripping. And, even if the great Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) didn't pop up, it'd still be an imaginative and beguiling piece of cinema. COME BACK ANYTIME Craving the rich, noodle-laden flavour that only ramen can bring is an instant side effect of watching Come Back Anytime. Yearning to wander into a tiny Tokyo ramen bar, take a stool at the bar and watch a ramen master at work — while you leisurely slurp through his brothy bowls, pair them with pan-fried gyoza, enjoy a sake or several, and chat to his regular customers — is just as natural a consequence. Directed by John Daschbach (Brief Reunion), this year-in-the-life portrait of Chiyoda City's Bizentei and its owner and chef Masamoto Ueda is culinary documentary filmmaking at its finest, examining a beloved type of dish, one talented man who has made it his life's work, and the many other lives — and tastebuds — touched along the way. When the film hangs out in the ramen bar, watching Masamoto cook, his wife Kazuko assist, and Bizentei's devotees savour every sip, it captures a place and a mood with the same affection as Las Vegas bar doco Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. When it explores Masamoto's technique and impact, it's the Jiro Dreams of Sushi of ramen movies. And when it cycles through the seasons, showing what different times of the year mean at the ramen joint in question, how its central figure's existence adapts and evolves, and also using its structure to prompt jumps back into both Bizentei's and Masamoto's history, it's never anything less than a deep, charming, soul-warming and all-round full cinematic meal. PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time first introduces Hungarian neurosurgeon Márta (Natasa Stork, Jupiter's Moon) as she's unloading her romantic woes upon her therapist. What could've been a standard rom-com or romantic drama setup soon twists into something far more alluring and intriguing, however, with writer/director Lili Horvát (The Wednesday Child) pondering just how we can ever know how someone else really feels about us, and how long any romantic emotions can last — and if we can ever trust those intense memories of love that implant themselves inside our brains and refuse to leave. After working in the US, Márta has returned home to Budapest suddenly because of fellow doctor János (Viktor Bodó, Overnight). They met at a conference in New Jersey, and pledged to cross paths again a month later on a Budapest bridge, but he doesn't show up. Worse: when she tracks him down at work, he says he doesn't know her. Márta can't bring herself to return stateside, though, and can't get János out of her mind in general. This is a haunting and beautifully acted psychological drama that lays bare just how all-encompassing, obsessive, intoxicating and mind-melting love can feel, all as it toys with memory and its ability to shape our perspectives. The tone is loaded but uncanny — sweet but uncertain, too — and Horvát has fun getting both emotional and cerebral while having her characters cut open brains. In other words, there aren't many movies quite like this one. THE NOWHERE INN "From now on, I need more say in how people are going to act," says Annie Clark. "It's a documentary," replies Carrie Brownstein. Winking and nodding (and gleefully eager to show it again and again), The Nowhere Inn tasks the famous pair with playing versions of themselves — under the guise of the Sleater-Kinney muso and Portlandia actor shooting a doco about St Vincent as she goes on tour for her album Masseduction. This psychological thriller-meets-mockumentary finds plenty to parody within its premise, especially after Brownstein suggests to Clark that she might want to let her onstage persona bleed out into the behind-the-scenes footage, because talking about radishes isn't really setting the right vibe. Cue a satirical interrogation of authenticity and performance, creativity and fame, and the riding the rollercoaster that is putting yourself out there in the world. Clark goes from mildly playing Scrabble and chatting about vegetables to becoming an OTT rock diva 24/7 and staging an affair with Dakota Johnson, with the Suspiria star even aping the musician's hairstyle. Meanwhile, Brownstein segues from trying to convey the different facets and blurred boundaries within her subject to sometimes recoiling from and sometimes embracing the exaggeration and artifice that comes with Clark being St Vincent non-stop. The two central figures wrote the script themselves, mining fame's existential struggles for both insights and laughs, and their commitment to the concept shows. Behind the lens, first-time feature filmmaker Bill Benz also brings a sketch comedy feel from his time on Kroll Show and, like Brownstein, Portlandia. NEW ORDER If only one word could be used to describe New Order, that word would be relentless. If just two words could be deployed to sum up the purposefully provocative latest film by Michel Franco (April's Daughter), savage would get thrown in as well. Sharing zero in common with the band of the same name, this 2020 Venice Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winner dreams up a dystopian future that's barely even one step removed from current reality — and in dissecting class clashes, and examining the growing discontent at the lavish lives indulged by the wealthy while so much of the world struggles, the mood and narrative are nothing less than brutal. The place: Mexico City. The setup: a wedding that goes wrong. As the ceremony gets underway at a compound-esque mansion jam-packed with the ultra-rich and ultra-corrupt, the chasm between the guests and the staff is glaring. Case in point: bride-to-be Marianne (Naian González Norvind, South Mountain) couldn't be more stressed when she's asked for money to help ex-employee Rolando's (Eligio Meléndez, La Civil) ailing wife, and plenty of her family members are flat-out rude about their former servant's plight. Then activists start making their presence known outside, and further afield in the city's streets. The military respond, sparing no one in their efforts to implement the movie's moniker. Franco doesn't want any second of New Order to be easy to watch, or for the parallels he's critiquing to go unnoticed — and while this definitely isn't a subtle film, it's a stylistically brash and bold, emotionally dynamic whirlwind that festers with palpable anger. STRAY In glorious 2016 documentary Kedi, Istanbul's stray cats received their moment in the cinematic spotlight, and also expressed much about the Turkish city and its human inhabitants in the process. The result was perfect — purrfect, even — regardless of whether you're normally a feline fan. With Stray, it's now their canine counterparts' time to shine. Istanbul has a 'no kill, no capture' law when it comes to the dogs roaming its streets, which is why there's more than 100,000 of them scampering around. And while documentarian Elizabeth Lo only spends time with a few of those tail-wagging woofers, including street veterans Zeytin and Nazar, as well as puppy Kartal, she stitches together a perceptive and textured portrait of their daily lives, of the city around them, and of the people who help and are helped by them. Making her first full-length film after a background in doco shorts, director/cinematographer/editor Lo lets her four-legged subjects be the stars, and lets her audience observe them. More than that, she frequently places the camera at canine height so that viewers feel as if they're seeing the world through a dog's eyes. Forget saccharine Hollywood flicks that use that idea as a gimmick (see: A Dog's Purpose and A Dog's Journey — or, better yet, don't see them because they're terrible). Here, immersion and insight are the key aims, and they're feats that the soulful and thoughtful Stray repeatedly, patiently and ruminatively delivers. THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER When spectacular choreography graces the screen, it's often via balletic feats of action or striking displays of movement and cinematography. The John Wick franchise and The Raid films demonstrate the first category, while movies with a hypnotic sense of physicality such as Climax and Ema sit in the second camp. The Girl and the Spider has little in common with any of these features, and yet it's still a stunningly choreographed film. Directors Ramon and Silvan Zürcher turn their attention to people going about their ordinary lives, as they did in their excellent 2013 debut The Strange Little Cat. Where that last delight almost solely remained inside one apartment, this movie flits between a few, as Lisa (Liliane Amuat, Those Who Are Fine) moves out of the flat she shares with fellow students Mara (Henriette Confurius, Golden Twenties) and Markus (Ivan Georgiev, Leipzig Homicide). As family members, neighbours, handymen and removalists all potter around, Mara only feigns to help. Really, she just hovers around as everyone else works, packs and moves, haunting the space and sometimes wilfully causing messes and scenes. The Zürcher brothers adore gazing at everyday domesticity and letting their characters' actions do plenty of talking. This is a chatty film, but the physical symphony of ordinary comings and goings says just as much. As it contemplates connections and absences, new starts and festering loneliness, and camaraderie and alienation — and isn't afraid to show its characters being awkward, petty and petulant — The Girl and the Spider also uses its enveloping sense of movement to embrace life's ambiguities. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOY IN THE WORLD In 1970, at the age of 15, Swedish teen Björn Andrésen's life changed forever. He walked into a hotel room to audition for Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, and only did so at his grandmother's urging — but, after the director was struck by his look and presence, the boy was quickly cast in the big-screen adaptation of Death in Venice. Soon, Andrésen would receive quite the compliment, too. When Visconti declared him "the most beautiful boy in the world" at the movie's premiere, the entire planet took notice. That statement had an impact and, while the experience would leave an imprint upon any shy adolescent who'd much rather be playing music than making movies but nonetheless finds himself becoming an international idol, it drastically altered Andrésen's entire future. That's the poignant story that The Most Beautiful Boy in the World tells with a perceptive eye; however, crucially, this isn't just a case of documentarians Kristina Lindström (Palme) and Kristian Petri (The Hotel) looking back, compiling archival footage — including Andrésen's initial audition video — and relaying all of the details from an outsiders' viewpoint. Their central figure is as much a part of the film now as he is in snippets from the past, and he's just as willing to interrogate how Death in Venice caused a major shift in everything he knew. His tale spans much further, too, covering several personal tragedies that he reflects upon with candour, next-level adoration in Japan and a pivotal role in Midsommar. The 2021 Melbourne International Film Festival runs until Sunday, August 22, screening online via the festival's streaming platform MIFF Play. For further details, visit the MIFF website. Looking for a few more MIFF movies to watch? Check out our first ten recommendations from this year's digital-only program.
What do you get when you cross a wine bar with a pub and slot it into a cosy shopfront on Johnston Street? Well, for Chris Wright and Jonathan Reisacher, the result looks a lot like their new Collingwood venture, Gum — a glam 70s-themed boozer heroing hot pies, tap brews and vintage cocktails. It's the first foray into hospitality for these two best mates, though, as music industry veterans, they're confident they've frequented enough bars in their time to know what works. Here, the winning formula involves a nostalgic 70s rock-chic fit-out by Brunswick designer Bianca Sciuto, imagined with the help of retro wallpaper prints, orange laminate table tops and plenty of curves. Yet more Aussie nostalgia shines through the food offering, which runs to a simple lineup of pies from Footscray's Pie Thief — expect varieties like the Big Mac pie and a vegan spaghetti bolognese number — plus sausage rolls and a classic vanilla slice. Eat them in, or grab a takeaway pack to-go. [caption id="attachment_790772" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Rubin Utama[/caption] Meanwhile, the drinks list serves up a tight, but diverse array of sips, featuring mostly Aussie wines and a range of around 20 craft tins from favourites like Fixation, 3 Ravens, Kaiju and Stomping Ground. A cocktail offering is full of flashbacks — think, banana cream daiquiris and a riff on the mai tai — alongside new-school creations like the vodka-infused Grapple starring green tea and apple boba. And if summer's got you feeling extra thirsty, there's a trio of shared cocktail jugs for $45, including The Aperoyal with its blend of prosecco, Aperol and rosé apple cider. Gum is also keen to help pack out your activities calendar, with local DJs now playing every Thursday to Saturday night and regular trivia sessions, games nights and Sunday barbecue parties also in the works. Images: Rubin Utama
In a world brimming with concrete jungles, it's time to escape the urban hustle and immerse yourself in the wonders of the wild. Together with Intrepid Travel, we've curated a list of unparalleled wildlife experiences, from heart-pounding encounters with orangutans to seeing gorillas, sea turtles and much more. All Intrepid Travel adventures are built with local communities, businesses and NGOs to support the conservation of wildlife and the people protecting the wild. So, you can rest assured knowing that the money you spend is reinvested into the protection of the wildlife you see and the communities you visit. Plus, every wildlife trip includes at least one local wildlife expert – either a local park ranger or Indigenous person with a special connection to the land. So, buckle up, fellow adventurers, and welcome to the wild side. See Rhinos at Dusk Did you know rhinos are most active at dusk? Black rhinos have made a huge comeback from their staggering low numbers of only 2500 to more than 6000 today, largely thanks to the massive conservation efforts across Africa. They are still registered as critically endangered, but there is hope. Their close cousins, the white rhinos, are near threatened. You can support their comeback from the brink of extinction by visiting the Khama Rhino Sanctuary on the edge of the Kalahari Desert — the only place left in Botswana where both black and white rhinos reside. Other wildlife that resides in this sanctuary include zebras, giraffes, leopards, ostriches and wildebeest, all of which can be seen grazing the many waterholes. Take a trip to the Okavango Delta region and visit the sanctuary and the Delta's lush waterways, where you can witness hippos and elephants going about their day. Swim with Sea Lions and Sea Turtles What wildlife experience could be better than island hopping through the Galapagos Islands? This archipelago is swarming with unique animals, from ancient giant tortoises and nesting blue-footed boobies to marine iguanas. La Lobería, located on the southwest coast of San Cristobal Island, is known for its white-sand beach and crystal-clear waters speckled with volcanic rocks that are sometimes teeming with sea lions. Don your snorkel set and swim with the locals; you might even spot a sea turtle or two. The wildlife doesn't just reside in the waters. As you take a break on land, you'll spot sea lions lounging around town. See the Big Five on Safari What's the Big Five, we hear you ask? The inhabitants of the expansive African bush: lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and African buffalo. Be immersed in the animal kingdom as you veer off the beaten track to seek out these local legends shelter under the flat-topped acacias in the epic setting of the Great Rift Valley and Lake Naivasha. Here, hippos spend their days floating among the floating islands of papyrus reeds. Monkey-Around with Orangutans Explore a mystical land of natural beauty and rare wildlife on an adventure to Sabah in Borneo. See where sea and green turtles lay their eggs; macaques, orangutans and proboscis monkeys hanging off branches; and, if you're lucky, pygmy elephants. The red-headed locals of the region are a huge draw. Orangutans are the largest arboreal mammal (tree-dwelling). They are highly intelligent, super strong, and, unfortunately, critically endangered. The world's first orangutan rehabilitation centre was set up in Sabah to support the red-headed giant. Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre opened in 1964 and now covers 43 square kilometres of the rainforest as well as a clinic, treatment ward and nurseries for orphaned orangutans. If you visit, you will see its protected orangutans in their wild habitat, as they can roam as they please. Seek Out Mountain Gorillas Follow local expert rangers through the steamy forests of Uganda to seek out and witness the rare and gentle mountain gorillas of the mountainous Bwindi National Park. These gentle giants have been pushed further and further up the mountains as their habitats are destroyed. But they are resilient, and their numbers have been bolstered over recent years thanks to conservation efforts. The silverback gorillas are calm creatures who spend their days eating, sleeping, grooming and playing. Visits to the gorillas are strictly controlled to minimise disturbance. For an unforgettable hour, watch the adult gorillas keep an eye on the scene and the smaller ones as they play or hang out in the trees. Get out, explore, dive into adventure and find your WOW with Intrepid Travel. Find out more on the website.
For viewers, much that occurs in Such Brave Girls inspires two words: "here's hoping". Here's hoping that no one IRL has ever been contractually obliged to slip their hand down the pants of the boyfriend that they despise twice a week and on special occasions, for instance. Here's hoping that no one has ever sat in a doctor's office caked in green wicked witch makeup waiting for an appointment about deeply intimate matters, either. The emotions that both situations capture in this brilliant new three-time BAFTA-nominated British sitcom— one digging into the feeling of being stuck on a path that's anything but your dream and dispiritedly going with it, the other surveying life's uncanny ability to put everyone in circumstances so absurd that they seem surreal — are that raw and resonant, however, that watching resembles looking in a mirror no matter your own experiences. If Such Brave Girls seems close to reality, that's because it is. In the A24 co-produced series — which joins the cult-favourite entertainment company's TV slate alongside other standouts such as Beef, Irma Vep, Mo and The Curse over the past two years, and streams via Stan in Australia — sisters Kat Sadler and Lizzie Davidson star as well as take cues from their lives and personalities. This isn't a play-by-play retelling, though. It doesn't claim to bring anyone faithfully and exactly to the screen. But it understands the truth of dealing with trauma, and its fallout and damage, making that plain vividly and with unflinching commitment. "Death, silence, hate" is this duo's personal spin on "live, laugh, love", they jest in a joking-but-not-joking way in-character; Such Brave Girls gets everyone giggling at the idea, but also backs it up. Making their TV acting debuts together — Sadler has previously written for Frankie Boyle's New World Order, Joe Lycett's Got Your Back and more — Sadler and Davidson also play siblings. Josie and Billie, their respective on-screen surrogates, are navigating life's lows not only when the show's six-episode first season begins, but as it goes on. The entire setup was sparked by a phone conversation between the duo IRL, when one had attempted to take her life twice and the other was £20,000 in debt. While for most, a sitcom wouldn't come next, laughing at and lampooning themselves, plus seeing the absurdity, is part of Such Brave Girls' cathartic purpose for its driving forces. If you've ever thought "what else can you do?" when finding yourself inexplicably chuckling at your own misfortune, that's this series — this sharp, unsparing, candid, complex and darkly comedic series — from start to finish. As well as creating the show and penning it, Sadler leads it as Josie, a bundle of nerves and uncertainty that's always earning Billie and their mother Deb's (Louise Brealey, Lockwood & Co) brutal honesty rather than sympathetic support. She's in her twenties, struggling with her mental health and aspiring to be an artist — but, above any firm sense of a career or a dream, she's largely working through a never-ending gap year as she tries to get through day after day. She receives a paycheque from a bookstore job that she abhors, usually while catching her colleagues off guard with her anecdotes. After hours, Josie's doting boyfriend Seb (Freddie Meredith, A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou) awaits — hovers at her side, pleads for sex and moves in without anyone telling her, to be precise — but she's certain that she's queer and only passionate about bartender Sid (Jude Mack, I Hate Suzie). Davidson's Billie is the eternally optimistic opposite of her sister — albeit really only about the fact that Nicky (Sam Buchanan, Back to Black), the guy that she's hooking up with, will stop cheating on her, fall in love and whisk her away to Manchester to open a vodka bar bearing her name. There's nothing that she won't do to make that happen, whether it means bleaching her hair to look identical to her competition (Carla Woodcock, Tell Me Everything) or agreeing to be Nicky's cover when he's busted at a nightclub for drugs. The other thing that Billie has an unwavering belief in, to a delusional degree: that their dad, who went out for teabags a decade ago and never came home, has just gotten lost at the shops because it rearranges its aisles all the time. Both girls live with the exasperated Deb, who also sees a relationship as the solution to her problems, setting her sights on the iPad-addicted Dev (Paul Bazely, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves). She's saddled with debt thanks to Josie and Billie's father going AWOL, and has picked her latest paramour as a path to financial stability thanks to his sprawling house alone. So, when she's not sternly advising her daughters to settle for what's easiest — "I know it's hard, but as you get older, you learn to love with less of your heart — less and less until eventually there's nothing left anymore" is one such piece of guidance; "work isn't about fulfilment, it's just so you can buy stuff to make you feel fulfilled" is another — she's telling them not to do anything to jeopardise what she considers the best chance they've all got as a family for a solvent future. With actor-slash-director Simon Bird behind the lens — alongside first-timer Marco Alessi on one episode — if Such Brave Girls seems like it belongs in the same acerbically comedic realm as The Inbetweeners and Everyone Else Burns, there's clearly a reason for that, too. That said, in its mix of humour and bleakness, alongside its dedication to diving headfirst into the messy existences of its three key female characters, it's also in Fleabag's wheelhouse. Nothing is too grim to find guffaws in, though, whether it's depression, existential malaise, suicide, termination, abandonment, daddy issues, death, grief, narcissism, infidelity or realising how much about life is simply learning to stomach disappointment. Call it searing, call it ruthless, call it insightful, call it hilarious: each one applies. Here's another "here's hoping" for Such Brave Girls' audience to put out into the world: here's hoping that there's more to come. Actually, here's yet one more: here's hoping that this is the start of big on-screen comedy careers for the show's sisters, who bring such a layered rapport to Josie and Billie that viewers who don't know that they're genuinely related will guess quickly, and who deliver masterclasses in comic timing again and again in the process. Brealey, who has Sherlock, A Discovery of Witches and Back also to her name, might appear to have a hard task, then, playing a convincing mum to real-life siblings. But Such Brave Girls doesn't just feel blisteringly authentic, even at its most ridiculous, whenever Sadler and Davidson are in the spotlight; it's that unvarnished with everyone. Check out the trailer for Such Brave Girls below: Such Brave Girls streams via Stan.
At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2024 started with Kandinsky and Louise Bourgeois exhibitions, all carrying over from 2023. Now that the middle of the year has hit, the Sydney institution has thrown over its walls to another massive art name: Alphonse Mucha. The Czech-born painter and illustrator is virtually synonymous with Paris in the art nouveau period in no small part thanks to posters for French stage actor Sarah Bernhardt in the late-19th and early-20th centuries — and Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau, AGNSW's big winter showcase, is dedicated to his work. In an exclusive-to-Sydney display that opened on Saturday, June 15 in Naala Badu, the gallery's north building, and runs until Sunday, September 22, Australian audiences can now step through why Mucha's art is so influential. Whether they're devoted to a theme, a movement or a specific artist, every exhibition tells a story, with this one exploring the two parts of its name: a man who gave an era its look and the aesthetic that he helped immortalise. This isn't a small step through all things Mucha, with more than 200 items featured. Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau is the most-comprehensive showcase of the artist's work that the country has ever seen, in fact. And yes, posters for Bernhardt and others are among the pieces on display, alongside illustrations, photographs, sculptures, jewellery and interior decoration. Surveying Mucha's five-decade career, created in collaboration with the Mucha Foundation in Prague and featuring works from the Mucha Family Collection, Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau also includes a digital component, with painting cycle The Slav Epic from 1912–26 — a piece that spans 20 canvases — getting the immersive treatment. AGNSW is also pairing works by Mucha with Japanese prints sourced from its ukiyo-e collection that date to the same period that Mucha was in Paris, plus band posters and record covers from the 60s and 70s, as well as manga from more recently, that demonstrate his ongoing influence. "Alphonse Mucha was one of art's great stylistic innovators, and whilst best known for his iconic posters and decorative designs that contributed to the development of art nouveau, we hope this truly comprehensive exhibition will offer audiences the chance to take a deeper look at the remarkable life of this fascinating artist and his humanistic ideals," said AGNSW Director Michael Brand. "We are grateful to the Mucha Foundation for their generosity in lending these treasures to allow audiences here in Sydney the chance to discover an exhibition not only rich in art but also in history, human achievement and political commitment." Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau displays at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain, Sydney from Saturday, June 15–Sunday, September 22, 2024. For more information, visit the venue's website. Images: installation view of the 'Alphonse Mucha: Spirit of Art Nouveau' exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 June – 22 September 2024, photo © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio.
From fancy jigsaw puzzles to cheese and charcuterie sets and whisky subscriptions, we're (thankfully) able to get a whole heap of entertaining and edible packages delivered to our doors during lockdown. The latest to launch is a big win for boba fans across the country: The Bubble Tea Club. While lots of bubble tea shops are delivering ready-to-drink boba, these DIY bubble tea sets mean you can make yourself a tea — whenever the whim hits. The Bubble Tea Club is delivering packs in eight different flavours (and 14 different toppings) all across Australia. You can get the classic milk, taro or Thai tea or go fruity with honeydew, mango, green apple, passionfruit or lychee. Toppings include the likes of coconut jelly, grass jelly, lychee popping pearls, aloe vera and red bean paste — and tapioca pearls, of course. Packs start with five serves (from as little as $20.95) and ten ($34.95) and go all the way up to 50 ($99.95) and 365 serves ($800) — because, face it, who doesn't want a boba a every day. Inside the packs, you'll find premium tea leaves, flavourings, toppings and wide straws (with reusable options available). Depending on how many you buy, the packs work out to as little as $2.19 a serve. And shipping is a $9.95 flat rate or free if you spend over $59. You can, of course, attempt to make your own boba pearls at home, too, but this is a lazy (and easy) version if you're not feeling quite that motivated. You can now order DIY bubble tea set from The Bubble Tea Club website.
Something delightful has been happening in cinemas in some parts of the country. After numerous periods spent empty during the pandemic, with projectors silent, theatres bare and the smell of popcorn fading, picture palaces in many Australian regions are back in business — including both big chains and smaller independent sites in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. During COVID-19 lockdowns, no one was short on things to watch, of course. In fact, you probably feel like you've streamed every movie ever made, including new releases, Studio Ghibli's animated fare and Nicolas Cage-starring flicks. But, even if you've spent all your time of late glued to your small screen, we're betting you just can't wait to sit in a darkened room and soak up the splendour of the bigger version. Thankfully, plenty of new films are hitting cinemas so that you can do just that — and we've rounded up, watched and reviewed everything on offer this week. TITANE Eye roll-inducingly terrible bumper stickers be damned; no one honks if they're horny in Titane. Revving when aroused is more this petrol-doused body-horror film's style, spanning characters both flesh and chrome. When she's seen writhing in fishnets atop a flame-adorned vintage Cadillac, the stony-gazed Alexia (debutant Agathe Rousselle) is working. She's titillating a Fast and Furious-style car crowd with her sexed-up display, but the car model still seems to hum with every gyration. After wrapping up, murdering a grab-happy fan with the metal chopstick keeping her hair up and then showering off the gooey, gory evidence, she's soon purring rhythmically inside that gleaming vehicle. Yes, in a plot detail that spilled the instant Titane premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Palme d'Or, this is the French car sex flick. How does someone fornicate with an automobile? Not inside or on the waxed hood, but copulating with the vehicle itself? That's one of this pumping piston of a movie's least interesting questions, although Titane does go there. In her sophomore effort after the also-phenomenal teen cannibal film Raw, writer/director Julia Ducournau isn't too interested in those specifics. She splashes the bouncy sex scene across the screen with lights flashing, human and motor pulsating as one, and pleasure seeping like exhaust fumes, but it's hardly the picture's only point of interest. Titane isn't the first feature to flirt with carnality and cars — Ridley Scott's The Counsellor had a gas-fuelled rendezvous less than a decade ago; Crash, from body-horror godfather David Cronenberg, is also steeped in automotive eroticism. But Ducournau's addition to the parking lot shrewdly links mechanophilia with agency and control, particularly over one's feelings and body. First, before cylinders start lustily thrusting, Titane finds the initial growls of Alexia's four-wheeled fascination via a quick race through her childhood. As a seven-year-old (fellow first-timer Adèle Guigue), she enjoys audibly rumbling along with the engine. She also likes kicking the chair in front of her, exasperating her dad (French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, director of Nocturama and Zombi Child) into an accident. For her troubles, she gets a plate of the titular element inserted in her cracked skull. That steely stare matches the alloy in her head even then. From the outset, Ducournau pairs blood and metal, reshaping her central figure while laying bare her vulnerabilities. She kicks her film into a gear it'll keep shifting into again and again, too, because this is a movie about modifications: physically, emotionally and while trying to claim one's own sense of self. Titane isn't just the French car sex film, clearly. It isn't merely a car sex movie about a woman partly forged from titanium, and with a penchant for piercing her way through those who block her road. Nor is it simply the French car pregnancy flick, with Alexia and the Caddy's tryst bearing fruit — a condition she tries to conceal, especially after more deaths lead her to Vincent (Vincent Lindon, At War), a fire chief who takes her in as his long-missing son. If Ducournau had made her script out of metal, she'd be moulding it in its molten form. She'd be letting it bubble; key to Titane's blistering appeal is its eagerness to let things boil, then brim over, because the feelings and ideas it works with are that scorching. If her feature was a car instead, it'd be that libidinous, fire-emblazoned Cadillac, which arrives with a bang, lures Alexia in and then lets loose. Read our full review. VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE What's more ludicrous in Venom: Let There Be Carnage: an alien invasion of one man's body that turns into a parasite-host odd-couple show, or a prologue that thinks Woody Harrelson could've been a 90s teen? Kudos to this sequel to 2018's Venom for starting how it means to go on, at least. With its opening, set in 1996 in a home for unwanted children, the film doubles down on silliness, overblown theatrics and packaging itself as a cartoonish lark. The goofiness of the original box-office hit was among its best traits, and worked because that ridiculousness rattled against the movie's gritty superhero setup. Venom adopted all the stylistic markers that've become the serious-minded caped-crusader formula, then let Tom Hardy bounce around like he was in a comedy. But this time, everyone's gone more than a little vaudeville, as has the movie — and the outcome is right there in the title. Carnage isn't just an apt term to describe the film, which has actor-turned-director Andy Serkis (Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle) behind the lens; it's also the name of its second symbiote, aka a flesh-munching extra-terrestrial who inhabits a bag of bones, then brings out its basest urges. Mercifully, Let There Be Carnage isn't big on rehashing the mechanics established in the initial flick, but Venom fits the bill, too, after the creature took up residence inside San Francisco journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy, Capone), then unleashed the franchise's one-body, two-personality double act. Carnage, the red-hued parasite, is the spawn of Venom, albeit bursting forth from condemned serial killer Cletus Kasady (Harrelson, Zombieland: Double Tap) after a scuffle with Brock. And yes, this is the kind of feature that has the scenery-chewing Harrelson proclaim its subtitle with glee. He bellows "let there be carnage!" with winking jokiness, but resembles a ringmaster announcing the next act in a big top. Scripted by returning scribe Kelly Marcel, who also mined Fifty Shades of Grey for all the humour she could — and using a story co-credited to Hardy, who clearly has an attachment to his Marvel-but-not-Marvel Cinematic Universe character — Let There Be Carnage isn't burdened with much plot. After getting murderous following his separation from girlfriend Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris, No Time to Die) in their youth, Kasady will only tell his tale to Brock before he's executed. The latter goes awry due to Carnage's arrival, and a deal. The new symbiote will reunite Kasady with Barrison, whose ability to manipulate sound has seen her locked in an asylum, if the sadistic criminal assists his havoc-wreaking passenger to dispense with Brock and Venom. Cue the obvious — yes, carnage — and an inevitable showdown. Harrelson wasn't an adolescent in the 90s, but his performance nods to that decade, back when his resume spanned White Men Can't Jump, Natural Born Killers, The People vs Larry Flynt, EDtv and the like. That isn't a compliment; he's simply summoning-slash-parodying that heyday, and he's in a film that wishes it released then. Indeed, Let There Be Carnage could've been the hit of 1993, 1999 or any other year before Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy reshaped the genre, the MCU turned it into one of the predominant forms of big-screen entertainment (and now small screen, too), and superhero flicks began arriving every few weeks. Really, Harrelson's work here feels like a chaotic distraction rather than a throwback nudge, because there's only one great thing about Let There Be Carnage: Tom Hardy arguing with himself Read our full review. BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN Banging is the certainly word for it; when Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn begins, it's with high school teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu, Beyond the Hills) and her camera-wielding husband Eugen (first-timer Stefan Steel) having loud, enthusiastic, pink wig-wearing sex — and filming it. Romanian writer/ director Radu Jude (I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians) shows the explicit three-minute snippet of footage as others will see it, because others will indeed see it: the students at Emi's school, their parents and her fellow teachers among them. All genitalia and thrusting and lustful talk (and shouted queries through the door from whoever is looking after the couple's child), this graphic opening also makes a bold and firm statement. So many people within the film's frames will take issue with it as vocally as Emi and her partner are enjoying themselves — and they're unmistakably enjoying themselves — but Jude definitely isn't one of them. 2021's Berlinale Golden Bear-winner, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn also starts with a gleeful provocation — not just to those seeing Emi and Eugen's home video within the movie, but to Jude's viewers. It's a jolting opening that's exactingly orchestrated to make audiences react, then unpack their own instant reflexes in tandem with the rude on-screen posse that may as well be waving pitchforks. The underlying question: to those who object, what makes this raunchy romp between two consenting adults so shocking? Worse exists on the internet en masse all the time, so is it its unexpected arrival? Within the picture, is it the fact that Emi is a teacher, a woman or that she's unapologetic, too? Both queries speak to ideas long internalised about what we see where, who we allow to do what, and the power that comes from enforcing arbitrary and hypocritical judgements about supposed immorality and obscenity. Indeed, loving, animated, costumed and sex toy-aided intercourse between a married couple in the privacy of their own home is the nicest thing that graces Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — until the feature's glorious climax, that is. What follows the intimate clip is a razor-sharp satire of a world that's so indifferent to so much ghastliness and so often, yet remains so unaccepting of carnality and so quick to use it as a reason to unbridle our worst sniping impulses. The film wields that notion as a weapon, all as Emi and Bucharest's other residents also navigate the pandemic. Jude could've set his scorching feature at any time, but overtly drawing attention to the daily behaviour that's been accepted while the globe battles a decimating virus — and the fact that some here would rather fixate on a different and trivial kind of viral spread — makes a blunt but perceptive point. Accordingly, in the cinema verite-style first section, Emi rushes around the city on foot, going about an ordinary day that morphs into anything but. Actually, given that she learns of the sex tape backlash while surrounded by everyday hostilities and vulgarities, this chapter reinforces an ugly truth: that the performatively horrified responses from the parents of Emi's students are all too routine. Then, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn's second act unleashes scathing and playful cine-essay snippets about the country's past, the planet's present, human behaviour — often at its most atrocious — and how porn is used as both a scapegoat and an anaesthetic. Lastly, a mask-wearing Emi is interrogated and publicly humiliated by parents and teachers, their punitive savagery and blatant sanctimoniousness on full display. Read our full review. THE UNFORGIVABLE There's a sense of symmetry to the fact that Netflix drama The Unforgivable marks Sandra Bullock's first movie in three years — since she last graced the big screen in Ocean's 8 and also starred in the streaming platform's hit Bird Box, both in 2018. After winning her Best Actress Oscar back in 2009 for The Blind Side, Bullock has appeared on-screen sparingly, featuring in just seven films over that period; however, when she puts in a phenomenal performance, she's as excellent as ever. In The Unforgivable, she does haunted, dead-eyed and determined like it's second nature, playing against-type as a woman just released from prison after a 20-year stint for murder. That said, she's also one of the best things about a movie that's almost everything else enough — serviceable-enough, watchable-enough, engaging-enough, compelling-enough — as it tracks an overstuffed redemption quest. Bullock's Ruth Slater has had two decades to stew on the incident that sent her to prison: the killing of a sheriff (W Earl Brown, No Man of God) who was trying to evict her and her then five-year-old sister Katie (Neli Kastrinos, Yellowjackets) from their family's farmhouse following their father's suicide. Upon getting out, she's warned by her parole officer (Rob Morgan, The United States vs Billie Holiday) about the difficulties of reintegrating back into normality, but finding her sibling (Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale) is the sole thing on her mind. That's complicated by Katherine's lack of memory of anything before her adoption, and her protective new parents (Succession's Linda Emond and The Comey Rule's Richard Thomas). And, while there's enough meat in that family reunion saga for the film's plot, that's only one of its threads. Screenwriters Peter Craig (Bad Boys for Life), Hillary Seitz (Eagle Eye) and Courtenay Miles (Mindhunter) have adapted The Unforgivable from three-part 2009 UK TV series Unforgiven; hence the jam-packed storyline that feels as if it's unwilling to trust that just one or two of its subplots could garner an emotional response. Also included: the stigma of life as a convicted cop-killer, a label that follows Ruth's every move; the sheriff's now-grown sons (Wonder Wheel's Tom Guiry and Dickinson's Will Pullen) and their revenge plans; a tentative connection with a colleague (Jon Bernthal, The Many Saints of Newark) at the fish factory where she works nights; the couple of well-off lawyers (The Suicide Squad's Viola Davis and Godfather of Harlem's Vincent D'Onofrio) who now live in the Snohomish County home that started all her trouble; and a secret that Ruth's been carrying for years. Davis is sorely underused, but also exceptional in her few scenes, carving out as much space as she can in a film that always seems hurried. There should be urgency to The Unforgivable, of course, given Ruth's desperate focus on reconnecting with her sister, but there's a sensation of rushing rather than immediacy. Still, thanks to her two biggest female names — with one yearning yet closed off, and the other segueing from affronted to understanding, Bullock and Davis' scenes together are repeated highlights — filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher) ensures that neither tension nor intensity is lacking in her English-language debut. With cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (Dolittle), she also smartly mines the parallels between Seattle's grey climes and the many shades in Ruth's restarted life, but The Unforgivable still never manages to quite match its best elements. BEST SELLERS Best Sellers is the latest case of casting-by-internet, or so it seems, at least: pairing up Aubrey Plaza and Michael Caine smacks of a feverish film Twitter dream. They both turn in fine performances, too, with the former coming off career-best work in Black Bear to play independent publishing house editorial director Lucy Stanbridge, and the latter getting a meatier role than his last Christopher Nolan-directed bit-part (that'd be Tenet) as cantankerous writer Harris Shaw. Lucy needs a big bestseller to save the business, which she took over from her father. Harris has been typing out manuscripts for the five decades since his sole success, which made the elder Stanbridge, but hasn't submitted the one he's under contract for to the company. Enter Lucy's solution to her pressing problem, and one that the reclusive Harris only goes along with because he's short on cash. Knowing how Best Sellers will turn out is as easy as knowing which marks the always-likeable Plaza and Caine usually hit. Indeed, it's knowing why their team-up instantly sounds like a winner on paper — she's acerbic, albeit in a slightly lighter mode than seen in her breakthrough Parks and Recreation role, while he relishes being a curmudgeonly, outdated drunk who yells "bullshite!" so much that it's soon a viral catchphrase. There's plenty to like about their scenes together, especially when sweetness seeps into the surrogate grandfather-granddaughter bond that develops while Lucy and Harris are on tour spruiking his new book anywhere and everywhere they can. In their solo moments, they both find rich notes of yearning and melancholy in their unlikely duo, too, cementing the film's tender but comic look at odd-couple kindred spirits. Nevertheless, while boasting its own shelf of charms, Best Sellers is more standard than stellar. Mostly, actor-turned-directing first-timer Lina Roessler and screenwriter Anthony Grieco, a fellow thespian-turned-debutant, remain happy doing the minimum — which is understandable when you have Plaza and Caine leading the show, but keeps the film from cutting as deeply as it could. There's hints of savvy savageness in Harris' rallying against the literary world, the commerce of publishing and everything that comes with being a celebrity, although it always sticks to the expected. The same applies in Lucy's willingness to rethink the usual relationship between art and money in order to get the new book, The Future Is X-Rated, to strike a chord with readers as the pair make dive bars their offices on their cross-country road trip. A movie can be nice and neat at once, and for one to be a pro while the other proves a con — and this is one of those movies. Even though it could've been so much more, Roessler's feature is an easy, undemanding and cosy watch, and its soft hues ensure that feeling remains as plain as an all-caps book cover. Best Sellers is also far too eager to stick to cliches, including that aforementioned gentle visual approach, which feels bluntly tailored to the weekday matinee crowd. Time might be against them — he's 88 now, and made it sound as if he might be done with acting while doing real-life promotional duties for Best Sellers, although he then walked that back — but here's hoping that Plaza and Caine get a second on-screen chance. Their first collaboration definitely whets the appetite for more; in fact, that's the firmest imprint it leaves. STRAY In gorgeous and glorious 2016 documentary Kedi, Istanbul's stray cats received their moment in the cinematic spotlight, and also expressed much about the Turkish city and its human inhabitants in the process. The result was perfect — purrfect, even — regardless of whether you're normally a feline fan. Indeed, it's the defining movie about mousers, and also about their relationship with both places and people (even trying to put the likes of Garfield, Cats, A Street Cat Named Bob and its sequel A Christmas Gift from Bob, some of cinema's other go-to kitties, in the same company is thoroughly pointless). With Stray, it's now their canine counterparts' time to shine, so animal-adoring film lovers can spread their love between cats and dogs equally. Where Kedi elicited purrs of elation, this dog-centric delight is a piece of tail-waggingly tender and thoughtful cinema, too. Istanbul isn't just an arbitrary choice of setting for this compassionate film; it has a 'no kill, no capture' law when it comes to the dogs roaming its streets, which is why there's more than 100,000 of them scampering around. That leaves documentarian Elizabeth Lo spoiled for choice, but she only spends time with a few of those woofers. They span street veterans Zeytin and Nazar, both of whom prowl the pavement as comfortably as they would someone's home, as well as puppy Kartal. As they sniff and scurry their way through their days, Lo stitches together a perceptive and textured portrait of their lives, of the city around them, and of the people who help and are helped by them — and, just like in Kedi (which she wasn't affiliated with at all), there's plenty of two-legged Istanbulites who prove forever changed by these canines' presence. Here, there's a group of young street-dwelling Syrian refugees that are especially touched by Zeytin, Nazar and Kartal as well. Making her first full-length film after a background in doco shorts, the director/cinematographer/editor lets her four-legged subjects be the stars, even though humans are an inescapable part of their existence. Lo is also happy to let her audience observe her furry heroes. More than that, she frequently places the camera at canine height so that viewers feel as if they're seeing the world through a dog's eyes, or getting as close as they can (far closer than simply watching your own pet on a home video, for instance). Forget saccharine Hollywood flicks that use that idea as a gimmick (see: A Dog's Purpose and A Dog's Journey — or, better yet, don't see them because they're terrible). In Stray, immersion and insight are the key aims. And, they're feats that the soulful and contemplative movie repeatedly, patiently and ruminatively delivers. The result is a doggie treat of a crisply lensed doco, and one of the biggest joys of both Kedi and Stray alike is the sensory experience that comes with their on-the-ground approach. Neither movie merely wants to just show audiences how their chosen animals live, but to convey as much detail as possible — which is where that canny camerawork, and also the feature's naturalistic soundscape, barks loudest. Some elements of Stray do strive a little too hard to resonate, though, such as its philosophical quotes about dogs and composer Ali Helnwein's score. But just as it's impossible to begrudge a pooch for being too energetic, it's difficult to fault a film this shrewd, earnest and heartfelt about the crucial role that canines inhabit in human civilisation, the many ways we benefit, and the sheer magic of a pure pupper-people connection. CRY MACHO Clint Eastwood has already had his animal phase, thanks to 1978's Every Which Way but Loose and 1980's Any Which Way You Can. At the age of 91, he's already had almost every phase in his career he's going to both in front of and behind the lens. Still, with Cry Macho, he takes the road already well-travelled by seemingly every other on-screen action star and tough guy. Eastwood has been far more than that across his filmography, but he's now buddying up with a child as everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vin Diesel to Dwayne Johnson and Liam Neeson have before him. Indeed, Cry Macho overtly resembles one of the latter's most recent movies, The Marksman, which only hit cinemas earlier in 2021. It stemmed from a former Eastwood collaborator, in fact, and felt like it should've starred him — which leaves his latest following in its footsteps. They aren't impressive footsteps to retread, although Eastwood and screenwriter Nick Schenk (a veteran of the actor/director's Gran Torino and The Mule) help imbue their feature with more depth than its predecessor. Their approach is straightforward and easy, yet it works, in no small part because seeing Eastwood stride across the frame always brings his wealth of prior roles to mind. Cry Macho leans into and toys with that past. That's an apt move in another way, given that this film could've been made with this star/helmer in the 80s, but he passed on it. Schwarzenegger also cycled in and out of the project a decade ago, but it seems this movie needed to wait for Eastwood. The throwback vibe it sports — that comes as much from it being penned by N Richard Nash in the 70s, rejected as a screenplay, then turned into a novel, as from being set in 1979 and 1980. A rodeo star whose life changed via injury (his own) and tragedy (losing his wife and son), Mike Milo (Eastwood) is content enough with his quiet twilight years. Alas, his old boss Howard (country singer Dwight Yoakam) now says that the cowboy owes him a favour. The rancher's teenage son Rafo (Eduardo Minett, La rosa de Guadalupe) apparently needs rescuing from his mother (Fernanda Urrejola, Party of Five), and Mike is the man reluctantly tasked with travelling to Mexico City to carry out the job. Unsurprisingly, the situation isn't as clearcut as Howard contends, with corrupt Federales, car thieves and other unhappy strangers on their path all muddying the road home even further. But a forced stopover in a small town, where cantina owner Marta (Natalia Traven, Soulmates) becomes the new female influence in their lives, helps forge a rapport. There's also a rooster called Macho, which is Rafo's best friend and his source of income via cockfighting — and the reason that Eastwood growls out the line "if a guy wants to name his cock Macho, that's fine with me". Mike doesn't take to the fowl at first but, of course, his way with animals is one of his defining traits. Cry Macho's chief struggle — its balance of what gleams and what's trite — shines through in this rooster relationship. There's something moving in the bond that obviously forms between Mike and Macho, as it does between Mike and Rafo, but it's also happy to be overly mawkish. The film looks the sun-drenched western part, and Eastwood plays his own part with grizzled grace; however, those uneasy balancing acts just keep popping up. Here, reflecting on what it really means to be macho and a hero goes hand in hand with writing off sexually confident women and having the movie's two primary female characters basically throw themselves at Eastwood, for instance. PALAZZO DI COZZO If Franco Cozzo was to spruik Palazzo Di Cozzo the same way he's promoted his baroque furniture business over the decades, he'd likely repeat one phrase: "grand documentary, grand documentary, grand documentary." He'd do so because that's what he's known for, and because his ads peppered with "grand sale, grand sale, grand sale" are a part of Melbourne's history, even inspiring a single that hit the charts. On the city's TV screens, Cozzo has been the face of his eponymous homewares store, so much so that he's a local celebrity. His lively exclamations fill much of this doco, too, through archival clips, observational footage of him at work and a to-camera interview. In the latter chat, he sits on one of the ornate chairs he's made a fortune selling, and answers interview questions like he's holding court — and for Melburnians familiar with his name and citywide fame, and for the uninitiated elsewhere, Palazzo Di Cozzo explains both the reason he's regarded as such a prominent personality. Written and directed by feature-length first-timer Madeleine Martiniello (The Unmissables), the result is a film about the hardworking jump its subject took from arriving in Australia from Sicily in 1956 to becoming part of the cultural fabric of his new home. Speaking about the mural painted of Cozzo in Footscray, graffiti artist Heesco notes that his tale is "the migrant dream"; however, while this affectionate film happily stresses that point, it also blissfully takes the easiest route. As a straightforward chronicle that covers the basics — who Cozzo is, what he's done, and also where, when, why and how — Palazzo Di Cozzo ticks the expected boxes in an informative and engaging-enough fashion. It tracks his story from making the move to Melbourne by boat and starting out as a door-to-door salesman, through to his 70s and 80s heyday, his frequent media presence, and his standing today. It lets his personality lead the way, too. And, the film also spends some of its early moments chatting to people who've decked out their houses with his wares, or watched their parents to do the same, to underscore what the rococo aesthetic has meant to Italian expats as an opulent slice of home. But even when one interviewee is in tears recounting how hard her mum and dad must've worked to spend $17,000 on Cozzo furniture in the 70s, there's always a sense that Palazzo Di Cozzo isn't scratching as deep as it should. The documentary doesn't avoid moments that Cozzo would rather forget, and even shows him getting irate when questioning heads in a direction he doesn't like; however, it also indulges rather than interrogates the persona that's leapt up around him over the years. Cue too many instances of people parroting his style of English back to him, and indulging a cartoonish stereotype — and very little effort to understand why that's the image Cozzo chose, what his popularity for playing that part says about Australia and its attitudes towards migrants, and also what the nostalgia afforded his way now says as well. Palazzo Di Cozzo is now screening in Sydney and Melbourne after opening in Brisbane earlier in the year when New South Wales and Victoria were in lockdown. If you're wondering what else is currently screening in Australian cinemas — or has been lately — check out our rundown of new films released in Australia on July 1, July 8, July 15, July 22 and July 29; August 5, August 12, August 19 and August 26; September 2, September 9, September 16, September 23 and September 30; October 7, October 14, October 21 and October 28; and November 4, November 11 and November 18. For Sydney specifically, you can take a look at out our rundown of new films that released in Sydney cinemas when they reopened on October 11, and what opened on October 14, October 21 and October 28 as well. And for Melbourne, you can check out our top picks from when outdoor cinemas reopened on October 22 — and from when indoor cinemas did the same on October 29. You can also read our full reviews of a heap of recent movies, such as Herself, Little Joe, Black Widow, The Sparks Brothers, Nine Days, Gunpowder Milkshake, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Old, Jungle Cruise, The Suicide Squad, Free Guy, Respect, The Night House, Candyman, Annette, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Streamline, Coming Home in the Dark, Pig, Big Deal, The Killing of Two Lovers, Nitram, Riders of Justice, The Alpinist, A Fire Inside, Lamb, The Last Duel, Malignant, The Harder They Fall, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Halloween Kills, Passing, Eternals, The Many Saints of Newark, Julia, No Time to Die, The Power of the Dog, Tick, Tick... Boom!, Zola, Last Night in Soho, Blue Bayou and The Rescue.
Another week, another cookie pie. That's how it feels sometimes thanks to Gelato Messina's beloved desserts — and no, we're not complaining. After the gelato chain first introduced its cookie pies to the world in 2020, it has kept bringing the OTT dessert back. We all need an extra dose of sweetness every now and then, obviously, including while both Sydney and Melbourne are in lockdown. So, it should come as no surprise that Messina is serving up the decadent dessert yet again. This time, though, it's quite the Frankenstein's monster of a dessert. This version is also a returning favourite — and, if you like fairy bread, cookie pies and Messina's gelato, prepare to get excited. Hang on, a cookie pie? Yes, it's a pie, but a pie made of cookie dough. And it serves two-to-six people — or just you. You bake it yourself, too, so you get to enjoy that oh-so-amazing smell of freshly baked cookies wafting through your kitchen. Now that you're onboard with the overall cookie pie concept, the fairy bread version really is exactly what it sounds like. That crunchy, crumbly cookie dough is filled with milk and dark Messina chocolate chunks, as well as vanilla custard. It's then topped with more 100s and 1000s than you've probably seen since your childhood birthday parties. It wouldn't be a fairy bread version otherwise, of course. You can only buy this pie in kits, which means that you'll get some of the cult ice creamery's famed gelato along with it. You can opt for a 500-millilitre tub for $38, a one-litre tub for $44 or a 1.5-litre tub for $48. If you're keen to get yourself a piece of the pie, they're available to preorder from 9am on Monday, July 19 — with pick up between Friday, July 23–Sunday, July 25 from your chosen Messina store. Once you've got the pie safely home, you just need to whack it in the oven for 30 minutes at 160 degrees and voila. You can preorder a Messina fairy bread cookie pie from Monday, July 19, to pick up from all NSW, Vic and Queensland Gelato Messina stores except The Star.
The Harbour City doesn't lack art highlights all year, every year, but every two years the New South Wales capital plays host to the Biennale of Sydney. 2024 will be one such year, with a hefty lineup in store under the theme Ten Thousand Suns. Wondering where you'll be going, which artists will be providing works and what events you'll be hitting up? March might still be almost half a year away, but the Biennale has unveiled more 2024 details. Art fans had already learned that everything will revolve around Ten Thousand Suns next year. The first 39 artists that'll be reflecting on the topic had been named as well, and the fact that White Bay Power Station will open to the public for the first time in over a century for the Biennale had similarly been announced. Now comes more creatives, places and specific events, all taking over Sydney — and for free — from Saturday, March 9–Monday, June 10, 2024. [caption id="attachment_910495" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Mr. Cuddles Under the Eave (2021). Trevor Yeung. Pachiras, straps, 7 x 8 x 8m. Photography: South Ho. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong.[/caption] Contributing pieces: 88 artists and collectives from 47 countries. Australia is represented, of course, as is everywhere from Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesia, India and Japan to Ukraine, Brazil, Mexico, the UK and the US. International talents include Andrew Thomas Huang, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Pacific Sisters, Martin Wong, Frank Moore, Maru Yacco and Anne Samat. Among the Aussies: Gordon Hookey, Tracey Moffatt, Serwah Attafuah, William Yang, VNS Matrix, Kirtika Kain, Joel Sherwood Spring and Juan Davila. Also, 14 First Nations artists have been commissioned by Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, one of the Biennale's partners, to make new works just for the event: Mangala Bai Maravi, Doreen Chapman, Megan Cope, Cristina Flores Pescorán, Freddy Mamani and Dylan Mooney, as well as Orquideas Barrileteras, John Pule, Eric-Paul Riege, Darrell Sibosado, Kaylene Whiskey, Yangamini, and Nikau Hindin in collaboration with Ebonie Fifita-Laufilitoga-Maka, Hina Puamohala Kneubuhl, Hinatea Colombani, Kesaia Biuvanua and Rongomai Gbric-Hoskins. [caption id="attachment_924219" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Ethics, 2021. Oil on canvas. Triptych: 244 x 183 cm; 120 x 120 cm; 244 x 183 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meeanjin / Brisbane. Photography credit: Carl Warner.[/caption] Expect to enjoy Mooney's mural tribute to Malcolm Cole, the queer queer First Nations dancer and activist who created history by leading the first-ever Aboriginal float at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade in 1988 — and also Sibosado's riji (aka pearl shell) designs in neon. Both will feature at White Bay Power Station, as will VNS Matrix's exploration of women and technology via banners. Chau Chak Wing Museum joins the Biennale of Sydney footprint for the first time, which is where Mangala Bai Maravi and Wong will feature pieces — one continuing to preserve tattooing patterns used by her people, India's Baiga group; the other being celebrated posthumously with nine paintings that focus on queer sexuality, as well ethnic and racial identities. At White Bay Power Station and Artspace, Indigenous weaving and jewellery making will be in the spotlight via Riege. Also at the latter venue, Gbadebo will display new ceramic works that continue her interrogation of her family's past and America's history of slavery. And over at the Art Gallery of NSW, Hookey and Yacco will have works on offer. The lineup also spreads over to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which is where pieces by Moore and Kain will feature — and to UNSW Galleries, where Sherwood and Elyas Alavi will be found. Whoever is showcased where, they'll be pondering heat, power, light, summer, joy, strength, the changing climate and everything else that the sun brings to mind. And, they'll be part of a lineup that also includes artist talks, art tours, workshops and more. Kicking off the 2024 Biennale of Sydney: Lights On, a concert at White Bay Power Station on Friday, March 8, with the Phoenix Central Park team curating an outdoor stage headlined by Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul. Vv Pete, UTILITY & Friends and DJ HALFQUEEN also feature on the bill, while roving performers will do the rounds and there'll be an indoor dance floor that uses a traditional Colombian picó sound system called El Gran Mono. [caption id="attachment_910498" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Cannot Be Broken and Won't Live Unspoken (2022) [installation view]. Anne Samat. Rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, beads, ceramic, metal and plastic ornaments. Wall panel: 365.75 x 731.5 x 61 cm. Floor: 609.5 x 609.5 cm. Commissioned by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Photographer: Anne Samat. Courtesy of the artist and Marc Straus, New York.[/caption]"Ten Thousand Suns departs from an acknowledgement of a multiplicity of perspectives, cosmologies and ways of life that have always woven together the world under the sun. A multiplicity of suns conveys ambiguous images. It evokes a scorching world, both in several cosmological visions and very much in our moment of climate emergency," said 2024 Biennale of Sydney Artistic Directors Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero about the program. "But it also conveys the joy of cultural multiplicities affirmed, of First Nations understandings of the cosmos brought to the fore, and of carnivals as forms of resistance in contexts that have surpassed colonial oppression." "The 24th Biennale of Sydney works with these different layers of meaning, acknowledging the deep ecological crises derived from colonial and capitalist exploitation while refusing to concede to an apocalyptic vision of the future. The 24th Biennale of Sydney proposes instead solar and radiant forms of resistance that affirm collective possibilities around a future that is not only possible, but necessary to be lived in joy and plenitude," Costinaș and Guerrero continued. BIENNALE OF SYDNEY 2024 — ARTIST LINEUP: Adebunmi Gbadebo (USA) Agnieszka Kurant (Poland / USA) Agnieszka Polska (Poland / Germany) Alberto Pitta (Brazil) Andrew Thomas Huang (USA) Anne Samat (Malaysia / USA) Barrileteros Almas del Viento (Guatemala) Bonita Ely (Australia) Breda Lynch (Ireland) Candice Lin (USA) Chitra Ganesh (USA) Choy Ka Fai (Singapore / Germany) Christopher Myers (USA) Christopher Pease (Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun, Australia) Citra Sasmita (Indonesia) Cristina Flores Pescorán (Perú / Netherlands / USA) Darrell Sibosado (Bard/Noongar, Australia) Destiny Deacon (KuKu (Cape York) & Erub/Mer (Torres Strait), Australia) Dhopiya Yunupiŋu (Gumatj/Yolŋu nation, Australia) Diane Burns (Anishinaabe/Chemehuevi, USA) Doreen Chapman (Manyjilyjarra, Australia) Dumb Type (Japan) Dylan Mooney (Yuwi/Meriam Mir/South Sea Islander, Australia) Eisa Jocson (Philippines) El Gran Mono (Colombia / Australia) Elyas Alavi (Hazara, Afghanistan / Australia) with Hussein Shirzad (Afghanistan / Australia); Jimmy Hintons (Australia); John Hintons (Australia) and Alibaba Awrang (Afghanistan / USA) Eric-Paul Riege (Diné/Navajo, USA) Felix de Rooy (Curaçao / Netherlands) Francisco Toledo (Mexico) Frank Bowling (UK / Guyana) Frank Moore (USA) Freddy Mamani (The Plurinational State of Bolivia) Gordon Hookey (Waanyi, Australia) Hayv Kahraman (Iraq / Sweden / USA) I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih (Murni) (Indonesia) Idas Losin (Truku/Atayal, Taiwan) Irene Chou (Hong Kong / Australia) James Eseli (Kala Lagaw Ya/Badhulaig, Torres Strait Islands, Australia) Li Jiun-Yang (Taiwan) Joel Sherwood Spring (Wiradjuri, Australia) John Pule (Niue / Aotearoa New Zealand) Josh Kline (USA) Juan Davila (Chile / Australia) Júlia Côta (Portugal) Kaylene Whiskey (Yankunytjatjara, Australia) Kirtika Kain (India / Australia) Köken Ergun (Turkey / Germany) Kubra Khademi (Afghanistan / France) Lawrence Lek (Malaysia / UK) Leila el Rayes (Australia) Mangala Bai Maravi (India) Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico / Germany) Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien (France) Martin Wong (USA) Maru Yacco (Japan) Mauroof Jameel & Hamsha Hussain (Maldives) Megan Cope (Ngugi/Noonuccal, Quandamooka, Australia) Ming Wong (Singapore / Germany) Monira Al Qadiri (Kuwait / Germany) Nádia Taquary (Brazil) Nikau Hindin (Te Rarawa/Ngāpuhi, Aotearoa New Zealand), Ebonie Fifita-Laufilitoga-Maka (Fungamapitoa, Tonga, Aotearoa New Zealand), Hina Puamohala Kneubuhl (Kihalaupoe, Maui, Hawai'i), Hinatea Colombani (Arioi, Tahiti), Kesaia Biuvanua (Moce, Lau, Fiji), Rongomai Gbric-Hoskins (Te Rarawa/Ngāpuhi, Aotearoa New Zealand) Niño de Elche & Pedro G. Romero (Spain) Orquideas Barrileteras (Guatemala) Özgür Kar (Turkey / Netherlands) Pacific Sisters (Aotearoa New Zealand) Pauletta Kerinauia (Miyartuwi (Pandanus), Tiwi Islands, Australia) Petrit Halilaj (Kosovo / Germany) & Alvaro Urbano (Spain / Germany) Robert Campbell Jnr (Ngaku/Dunghutti, Australia) Rover Joolama Thomas (Kukatja/Wangkajunga, Australia) Sachiko Kazama (Japan) Sana Shahmuradova Tanska (Ukraine) Satch Hoyt (UK / Jamaica) Saule Dyussenbina (Kazakhstan) Segar Passi (Meriam Mir/Dauareb, Torres Strait Islands, Australia Sergey Parajanov (Armenia / Georgia) Serwah Attafuah (Ashanti, Australia) Simon Soon (Malaysia) Tarryn Gill (Australia) Te Whā a Huna (Tūwharetoa, Aotearoa New Zealand) Tracey Moffatt (Australia) Trevor Yeung (China / Hong Kong) Udeido Collective (West Papua) VNS Matrix (Australia) Weaver Hawkins (England / Australia) Wendy Hubert (Guruma/Yindjibarndi, Australia) William Strutt (UK) William Yang (Australia) Yangamini (Tiwi; Gulumirrgin; Warlpiri; Kunwinjku; Yolŋu; Wardaman; Karajarri; Gurindji; Burarra, Australia) The 24th Biennale of Sydney will run from Saturday, March 9–Monday, June 10, 2024. Entry will be free, as always. We'll keep you posted on the whole artist lineup and exhibition program when they're announced. Top image: Ngarrgidj Morr (the proper path to follow), 2022. Darrell Sibosado. Powder-coated steel, LED tubes, fittings, electrical component. 300 x 245 x 8 cm (each panel). Collection of The National Gallery of Australia. Photographer: TheNational Gallery of Australia. © Darrell Sibosado.
Practise your Cockney accent, rehearse your favourite drunken London tale and prepare for high tea: the British Film Festival has arrived in Australia for the first time ever. There'll be a dozen contemporary features, five 20th-century classics (The Third Man and Lawrence of Arabia among them) and a chance to quiz Eric Bana during a live Q&A session, and a simply smashing opening night party. One film not to miss is Jump, a massive hit at the Toronto International Film Festival that captures the stories of three troubled individuals, who find themselves entangled by doomed romance, theft and revenge. Another much-talked-about feature is eccentric rock movie Good Vibrations, which comes to the British Film Festival following sold-out sessions at the 2013 Melbourne International Film Festival. Set against Ireland's Troubles of the 1970s, it follows the story of rebellious, maverick music lover Terri Hooley, Belfast's 'godfather of punk', and his determination to show the world the power of the seven-inch single. The star power is in Dom Hemingway, a gangster film in the style of Sexy Beast. It stars Jude Law as the outrageous, volatile Dom and Richard E. Grant as his best friend, Dickie. Following Dom's release after 12 years of imprisonment, the two travel from London to the south of France, encountering all number of misadventures along the way, from a car accident to an inevitable femme fatale. There's also the latest offering from Uberto Pasolini (producer of The Full Monty), Still Life, a drama in the British humanist tradition. The British Film Festival is on in Melbourne (November 20 to December 1), Sydney (November 21 to December 1), Brisbane (November 27 to December 8) as well as other cities around Australia. Thanks to the festival, we have 15 double in-season passes to give away. To be in the running, subscribe to the Concrete Playground newsletter (if you haven't already), then email us with your name and address. Sydney: win.sydney@concreteplayground.com.au Melbourne: win.melbourne@concreteplayground.com.au Brisbane: win.brisbane@concreteplayground.com.au
If you've got a hard earned thirst for some spiffy new beer merch, the folks at Victoria Bitter have you covered — again. Last year, the famed Carlton & United Breweries beer released a range of branded VB gear, going old school with their designs. This year, it has teamed up with menswear label Mr Simple and visual artist, director and animator Lee McConnell on a line of pop art-inspired pieces for your wardrobe, your feet and your head. There's still a definite retro edge to the new collection, with the folks behind the Aussie brew always keen to nod to its lengthy history quenching the thirst of hardworking folks. This time around, you can kit yourself out in clothing that nods to summer, Australian-style — so, as well as VB bottles, cans and logos, there are also cockatoos and melted palm trees. These elements are splashed across a collared 'BBQ shirt', resort-style shorts and socks. If you're keen on a vintage-style t-shirt, four different styles are available, including an Andy Warhol-inspired print, and recreations of old VB logos from beer trays and draught bottles. And yep, these threads are sure to get a serious workout over the upcoming festival season. Alongside the clothes, you'll find vintage-inspired stickers and coasters, a VB stubby cooler and a VB cap. Designing the pop art -influenced pieces, McConnell adds to his hefty resume. He nabbed an ARIA nomination for Best Cover Art for Dune Rats' The Kids Will Know It's Bullshit, and is known for his work both with the band, and with Jack River — as well as for Mambo. The VB x Mr Simple range is available for purchase online. Images: Mr Simple.
Australia has a penchant for good food, an adventurous spirit and a willingness to try the new and exciting. It's a combination that makes for a pretty stand-out culinary scene, as local chefs continue to push boundaries, flex creative muscle and hit reset on the latest and greatest food finds. Shifting philosophies and changing attitudes have spawned a whole wealth of food trends across the past decade, from the fun, to the health-focused, to the wildly inventive. Some of them were even started by TV shows — specifically MasterChef Australia, which is celebrating ten successful, and influential, years on the screen. Together, we've pulled together a list of the top ten trends that have shaped Australia's dining scene in the past decade, covering everything from diet trends and insects to one very special (Snow Egg-shaped) dessert. [caption id="attachment_658869" align="alignnone" width="1930"] Pezzo, Giulia Morlando[/caption] RIFFS ON OLD-SCHOOL FAVOURITES A healthy dose of nostalgia, mixed with a splash of creativity and a dash of daring attitude. It became the recipe for success as chefs began to revamp the classics and rejig those childhood favourites into modern masterpieces. Sydney cafe Dutch Smuggler had people scrambling for its new-school jaffle creations, rocking an unlikely, but addictive filling of Mi Goreng noodles. Bad Frankie led Melbourne's jaffle renaissance with its now iconic lamington version. Guy Grossi's Pezzo brought the pizza pocket back into our lives, and Matt Wilkinson took on an Aussie staple with his Brunswick East spot, The Pie Shop. And no one could forget Bar Liberty's opening attraction — a white bread, chicken-skin crackling, tomato and lettuce homage to the classic BLT. [caption id="attachment_598217" align="alignnone" width="1280"] Jethro Canteen, Jo Rittey[/caption] INSECTS In the name of sustainability, insects, bugs and creepy crawlies have marched their way into the culinary world, appearing on menus and embraced by top chefs the country over. Kylie Kwong showed her love for insect dining back in 2013, adding creations like cricket and prawn wontons, and stir-fried crickets to the lineup at her acclaimed Sydney restaurant Billy Kwong. Melbourne's now closed zero-waste cafe Silo also flew the flag for edible crickets, with chef Matt Stone enlisting the help of a horticulturist to grow and harvest the venue's own supply. And the trend's stuck around — famed Melbourne restaurant Attica turned heads with a black ant lamington, and today, you'll even spy roast crickets sprinkled onto a noodle salad at Richmond's Jethro Canteen. [caption id="attachment_601490" align="alignnone" width="1280"] Saint Peter, Nikki To[/caption] SEA URCHIN It might be considered a pest of the ocean, but the humble sea urchin has become a hero of the fine dining scene, dressed to impress, in elegant dishes at some of the country's hottest restaurants. The sea urchin's (this little creature) popularity in Japanese cooking lent plenty of influence here on Aussie shores — we saw it teamed with wasabi and caviar, atop rice crackers at Chris Lucas's Kisumé, and regularly crafted into stunning creations by acclaimed sushi master Koichi Minamishima at his namesake Richmond restaurant. But leave it to our own seafood king Josh Niland to plate up urchin with an Aussie twist — the chef's beloved Saint Peter serves the delicacy cradled in its spine, teamed with a warm, house-made crumpet. [caption id="attachment_662760" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Mjolner, Kate Shanasy[/caption] DIET TRENDS As diners embraced a whole plethora of modern-day diets, the wellness craze trickled beyond gyms and home kitchens, onto menus, and even spawning a new breed of healthed-up, diet-centric eateries. One second veggies were king, and the next the paleo movement had us all getting back in touch with our prehistoric selves, heroing meat and celebrating fats. Mjølner — in both Melbourne and Sydney — puts meat front and centre. Patch Cafe landed in Melbourne's Richmond with an entire offering dedicated to the primal-style diet, from 'bulletproof' coffee jazzed up with coconut oil and butter, to pasta crafted from zucchini. And Sydney haunts like Proteini also painted healthy eating fun, with colourful, flavour-packed dishes centred around nature's best. Cornersmith, Steve Woodburn FERMENTS As pickles, cultures and funky ferments made their way into the collective consciousness, they inspired chefs across the country to have a crack themselves, incorporating those gut-healing powers and that microbial magic into all kinds of dishes. Fine dining degustations and cafe menus alike began to incorporate house-fermented goodies, from sourdoughs and sauerkraut, to Korean-style kimchi. As with lots of other foodie trends, this craze also sparked plenty of DIY action, as everyday home cooks clambered aboard the fermentation train. Experts have been more than happy to share their secrets, with a host of classes offered by the likes of Marrickville's Cornersmith, The Craft & Co in Collingwood, and the Melbourne-based Wild Ferments. [caption id="attachment_671361" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Double Good[/caption] CHARCOAL Black became the new black as the culinary world embraced all things charcoal, as much for the purported health benefits as for that dramatic, head-turning colour. Kitchens everywhere got creative with the chemical-absorbing ingredient. Port Melbourne cafe Long Story Short made waves when it added activated charcoal fish and chips to the menu, though the presentation of black logs on a plate raised its fair share of eyebrows. Ink-coloured charcoal tarts starred in the adventurous lineup at Carlton cafe's now-closed Nora, and Brisbane punters went nuts for the Black Elvis charcoal soft serve at Eat Street's Double Good. [caption id="attachment_549358" align="alignnone" width="1280"] Snow Egg, Quay[/caption] STAND-OUT DESSERTS These days, the dessert game is all about leaving a lasting impression — not just on the person holding the spoon, but on our whole food-obsessed country. Wow factor became the go-to ingredient in this battle of the sweets, with each new creation vying to become the stuff of legend. Simplicity got the boot in favour of memorable extravagance. Peter Gilmore's famed Snow Egg stole the show in the Season Two finale of MasterChef Australia, and at Gilmore's restaurant Quay. Punters were happy to queue for an age to get their hands on one of Rustica Sourdough's famed cronuts, and Dan Hunter created an unlikely smash-hit with his oyster ice cream at Brae. [caption id="attachment_647927" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Hawker Chan[/caption] STREET FOOD Tucking into street food overseas can be a gamble, so we'll be forever grateful for Australia's multiculturalism and the young gun chefs bringing incredible street eats from all corners of the globe, to our own backyard. Fast, fun, and creative, street food has become a staple of our casual dining scene, even inspiring home-grown versions of international casual dining experiences. In Melbourne, the neon-drenched HWKR is delivering a modernised riff on the hawker centres of Southeast Asia, its four kitchens playing host to a globe-trotting rotation of buzz-worthy eateries, including Chanteen by Diana Chan. Chan is the winner of MasterChef Australia Season 9 and her pop-up eatery is currently serving up a slew of Singaporean and Malaysian street foods such as char kuey teow and soft shell crab sliders. You'll also find Michelin-starred Singaporean street food at Hawker Chan. Meanwhile, Sydneysiders have scored a swag of cuisine-specific street food restaurants, offering authentic flavours straight from the likes of Bangladesh (Bang) and India (Delhi Streets). [caption id="attachment_670959" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Fred's[/caption] SMOKE & FIRE Another hot foodie trend saw a barrage of chefs getting back to basics, turning to fire and smoke to bring their dishes to life. The wood-fire grill became star of many a high-end kitchen. Geelong fine diner Igni, fittingly named for the Latin word for 'fire', has quickly built a shining reputation on its devotion to the humble flame, as chef Aaron Turner's sharp technique and beloved wood grill put the tiny regional restaurant on the map. Fire's also been the force behind Adelaide's famed Africola, where Duncan Welgemoed is grilling and smoking in homage to the flavours of his homeland, South Africa, and at Sydney's Fred's where Chez Panisse alumnus Danielle Alvarez cooks most ingredients on an open hearth. [caption id="attachment_660428" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Mark + Vinny's[/caption] VEGETARIANISM Slowly but surely, vegetarianism has shed its dowdy, ugly duckling image and became one of the cool kids, as folks everywhere started to pay a little more attention to the planet. Menus across the globe came to the party and it opened up the door to some seriously creative plant-based dining offerings, the international charge led by the likes of Israeli-British chef Yotam Ottolenghi and his stunning cookbooks. Closer to home, Melbourne's Transformer matches a vegetarian menu to fine dining sensibilities, and vegan-friendly pasta bar Mark + Vinny's became Sydney's new millennial hotspot. Catch the latest season of MasterChef Australia from Sunday to Thursday at 7.30pm on Channel Ten.
Not that you need any extra incentive to do your bit for the environment, but here's a fun one anyway: your mates at Victoria Bitter have just started a new program that lets Aussies swap their excess solar energy for beer. Under the VB Solar Exchange initiative, locals can turn the power bill credit earned by their home's solar panels into a few icy cold brews, rather than simply selling it back to the grid. Specifically, VB is offering participants in its program a slab of beer for every $30 worth of energy credits they rack up. And, those brews will be delivered straight to your door, too. Of course, not just any old beer lover can get involved — and there are a few tight eligibility requirements to meet. First, you'll need to already have solar panels and be connected to the grid as a residential customer in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria or South Australia. You'll also have to switch over to VB's chosen energy retailer, Diamond Energy. And you'll obviously need to be over the age of 18, so you can properly enjoy the spoils of your solar swapping. If you do tick all the boxes, you can register your interest over at the website and then sit back and wait to hear if you've been accepted into the program. Once in, you'll earn yourself a VB for every $1.25 of credit generated — and a slab once you've clocked up enough for 24 beers. Participants can track their progress as they go, with beers delivered to your door quarterly. That said, VB's producer CUB is only accepting 500 people into the program. It's also only handing out a maximum of 30 slabs per person each year, with debit cards sent out to cover the remaining credits. So if you're keen, don't wait too long to sign up. CUB is set to reinvest the solar credits back into the Solar Exchange program, as well as using a portion to hit the company's broader sustainability targets. The program is the latest in a suite of initiatives by CUB's parent company Asahi Beverages, as part of an ambitious sustainability program. It's committed to being powered by 100 percent renewable electricity by 2025. Registrations for the VB Solar Exchange are open now. Head to the website to check if you're eligible and to sign up.
Almost three decades ago, Spiderbait made Australian music history when they won Triple J's 1996 Hottest 100 with 'Buy Me a Pony'. They were the first local act to top the countdown. Now, that catchy track has a chance to again notch up a huge feat: taking out Triple J's new Hottest 100 of Australian Songs. Aussie tunes have emerged victorious in the station's annual countdown plenty of times since, of course. So, it isn't just 'Buy Me a Pony' that's in the running to be a two-time winner. That feat mightn't be achieved at all anyway — because there's no shortage of excellent Australian tracks that haven't topped a Hottest 100 before but might just come out in the number-one spot in the Aussie-only poll. Whichever song that you're certain should be named Australia's best, voting is open as at 8am AEST on Tuesday, June 17. You've got a month to pick your favourites — until 5pm AEST on Thursday, July 17, 2025. The results will then be broadcast from 10am AEST on Saturday, July 26, 2025 on not only Triple J, but also Double J, Triple J Unearthed and its dedicated Triple J Hottest station. Although no one needs a reason to celebrate Aussie music, Triple J has one: 2025 marks its 50th birthday. That fact ties into one big caveat when you're voting, you do need to choose a track that was released before the station hit that milestone on Sunday, January 19, 2025. [caption id="attachment_854346" align="alignnone" width="1920"] M Drummond[/caption] The Triple J and Double J voices that'll be counting down your picks include Ash McGregor, Dave Woodhead, Dylan Lewis, Yumi Stynes, Abby Butler, Tyrone Pynor, Concetta Caristo, Luka Muller, Zan Rowe and Lucy Smith. And if you're curious about which other tunes, aside from 'Buy Me a Pony', could score the double win, 'No Aphrodisiac' by The Whitlams, 'These Days' and 'My Happiness' from Powderfinger, 'Amazing' by Alex Lloyd, 'Are You Gonna Be My Girl?' from Jet, 'Wish You Well' by Bernard Fanning, 'One Crowded Hour' from Augie March, and 'Big Jet Plane' by Angus and Julia Stone are also in the running, for starters. Gotye's 'Somebody That I Used to Know', Vance Joy's 'Riptide', Chet Faker's 'Talk Is Cheap', The Rubens' 'Hoops', Flume's 'Never Be Like You' and 'Say Nothing', Ocean Alley's 'Confidence' and The Wiggles' 'Elephant' have also all topped the yearly poll before. Tame Impala's 'The Less I Know the Better' won the 2010s-centric countdown, while DMA's 'Believe' did the same for the Like a Version poll. Triple J's Hottest 100 of Australian Songs will broadcast from 10am AEST on Saturday, July 26, 2025 — with voting open between 8am AEST on Tuesday, June 17–5pm AEST on Thursday, July 17, 2025. Head to the Triple J website for further details. Top image: Ocean Alley, Neegzistuoja via Wikimedia Commons.
The perpetual re-creation of urbanscapes amounts to copious waste. It's true that an abundance of recycling processes aims at diminishing resource use. However, they're often heavy on the energy consumption front. Consequently, designer Omer Haciomeroglu, in conjunction with Atlas Copco, has come up with 'ERO: Concrete De-Construction Robot'. It's programmed to pull apart reinforced concrete structures, so that they can be re-used in the construction of pre-fabricated concrete buildings. 'Today, operators manually control different sized demolition machines to smash and crash the concrete structure into dusty bits within the demolition location,' Haciomeroglu explains. 'All of these machines consume a lot of energy to operate. Water has to be sprayed constantly over the pulverised surfaces with fire hoses to prevent harmful dust from spreading around. After the work is done, big machines come and scoop the rebar and concrete mixture and transfer them to the recycle stations outside the city. There, the waste needs to be separated manually.' So, Haciomeroglu designed ERO to separate materials during the de-construction process, achieved through Hydro-demolition and Centrifugal Decanter technologies. This means that new concrete blocks can be created onsite. In the 2013 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA), ERO won First Prize in the Student Designs category. Haciomeroglu has studied design at California State University, Istanbul Technical University and the Umea Institute of Design, Sweden. 'As a developing designer I always look forward to being part of design teams that develop projects, concepts and products that will grant us, the humankind, valuable and entertaining vision of a better and sustainable future,' he explains. [via PSFK]
Well, folks, the game is up. It turns out Transport for NSW had us all fooled when it announced the winner of last year's public ferry-naming competition, giving the honour to Ferry McFerryface as the most popular submission. But, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald today, the whole thing was cooked. The name Ferry McFerryface actually scored just 182 votes in the 15,000-participant survey and only won top spot because it was the favourite of Transport Minister Andrew Constance. Plenty less comical names were snubbed in the process, including that of Clean Up Australia founder Ian Kiernan, who nabbed 2000 votes and was told the boat would be named after him, only to have the minister change his mind. The ferry — which has been on the harbour since December — will now be renamed after another strong contender in the original competition, late children's author and illustrator May Gibbs. She's the talent behind those iconic Gumnut Babies characters and classic titles you would have read as a kid like the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie series. Let's hope some of that wholesome, honest energy rubs off on Mr Constance. Via The Sydney Morning Herald.
Come 2026, almost a decade will have passed since Qantas proposed changing the way that Australians travel to two of the world's biggest cities — and most-popular holiday destinations — from the east coast. That plan: Project Sunrise, the initiative that's making non-stop flights from Sydney to London and New York a reality. It was first announced in 2017, ran trial flights in 2019 and has undergone delays since, including moving a 2025 start date to mid-2026. With its launch date now just two years away, Qantas is speeding ahead with the lengthy journeys, which'll join the Perth-to-London flights that began in 2018. (From Western Australia, the carrier also boasts straight-to-Rome routes, and just implemented Perth-to-Paris legs as well.) If spending all of that time on a plane sounds like it'll be an experience — the aircrafts are capable of staying in the air for up to 22 hours — the airline understands. Indeed, part of the Project Sunrise development process has been dedicated to ensuring that passenger wellbeing doesn't suffer, and also working out how to combat jetlag. Here's one solution, or at least a tactic to help: Qantas has revealed that its 238-person Project Sunrise A350-1000 planes will feature cabin lighting inspired by the Australian landscape, which will cycle through phases to help travellers adapt to the ultra long-haul voyage — and to the time zone when they disembark. The airline has been making the most of Hamburg's Airbus Customer Definition Centre, using a mockup of the A350 cabin to test lighting patterns and sequences, after the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre conducted research during the Project Sunrise test runs on the inflight experience and reducing jetlag. Those learnings noted that some light spectrums work better to get circadian rhythms adapting. Cue plenty more testing, resulting in 12 lighting scenes for Project Sunrise's trips. Among them: using a broad-spectrum glow enriched with blue hues as an awake setting, which can also be softened; cycling through the tones of the sunset as it turns into a moonlit night, complete with clouds, to get travellers ready to go to sleep; and replicating an Aussie sunrise, starting at the front of the aircraft and rolling out to the back, when it's time to greet either London or NYC. Boarding, taxiing, take-off, sleep, landing and disembarking also have their own lighting modes. The planes will feature wellbeing zones that'll sport the colours of a daytime sky, clouds and all, when the flight is in its daytime setting. The same space will move to moonlight and water rippling during the journey's evening phase. And for those flush with cash, the enclosed first-class suites will let passengers fully customise their own lighting. As advised back in 2023, those wellbeing zones on the stopover-free hauls will sit between the 140-seat economy and 40-seat premium economy cabins. Inside, stretch handles and an exercise program guided via screens will get you active, while refreshments will be on offer at the hydration station. As for the cabins themselves, every seat will have free wifi, USB-C charging ports and also wireless charging and bluetooth connectivity so that you can use your own headphones — and, they'll feature in good news for your body, Qantas' most-generous seat pitches yet, plus ergonomic leg and foot rests. Qantas' direct flights from Sydney to London and Sydney to New York are set to take to the air in mid-2026. For more information, head to the Qantas website.
Thirty-five years ago, Spike Lee (American Utopia) directed his fourth film. Following a jazz trumpeter portrayed by Denzel Washington (Gladiator II), Mo' Better Blues started one of cinema's finest filmmaker-actor collaborations. Before that decade was out, the pair also made 1992's Malcolm X and 1998's He Got Game together. Then came 2006's crime-thriller Inside Man. Next, after a nearly two-decade wait, arrives Highest 2 Lowest. Lee and Washington are two of the biggest names in America filmmaking, and they're back in business together, teaming up on a movie that premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and will soon stream Down Under via Apple TV+. Highest 2 Lowest initially dropped a sneak peek back in May, asking if audiences can "handle the mayhem?". Ahead of the A24 flick's cinema release in the US, the picture has just unveiled its full trailer. The latest Lee-directed joint not only sees two icons reunite, but also reimagines the work of another. This time, the two Oscar-winners (Lee for BlacKkKLansman's screenplay, Washington for Glory and Training Day) are reinterpreting 1963 crime thriller High and Low from Akira Kurosawa. In the New York City-set Highest 2 Lowest, Washington plays a music mogul who is about to navigate quite the chaos. His character is renowned for having the "best ears in the business", then is saddled with a ransom plot, while also being faced with a moral dilemma with potentially grave repercussions. Also featuring Ilfenesh Hadera (Godfather of Harlem), Jeffrey Wright (The Last of Us), Ice Spice and A$AP Rocky (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You), Highest 2 Lowest is Lee's first film since 2020, when both Da 5 Bloods and concert movie American Utopia released. The movie has a date with US cinemas from Friday, August 22, 2025, then viewers everywhere — including in Australia and New Zealand — will be able to watch Highest 2 Lowest via Apple TV+ from Friday, September 5, 2025. Check out the full trailer for Highest 2 Lowest below: Highest 2 Lowest streams via Apple TV+ from Friday, September 5, 2025.
Last week, NASA announced that it would start rocketing into space from Australia. This week, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration has revealed plans to allow tourists to not only soar beyond the earth, but spend time on the International Space Station. If you've ever wanted to hang out in an artificial satellite that's orbiting the planet — and you have spare piles of cash secreted away — your dreams might just be about to come true. Possibly commencing as early as 2020, private astronauts will be able to spend up to 30 days on the ISS, with two tourists allowed onboard at any one time. But before you go getting too excited, it'll come at a cost, obviously. Visitors will need to pay US$11,250 a day for use of life support and bathroom facilities, plus an extra $22,500 per day for food, air and medical supplies — and also fork out for the presumably ultra-expensive trip to actually get there. NASA won't be running an off-planet bed-and-breakfast, unsurprisingly, or a space public transport system. Rather, the move comes as part of a broader approach, with the ISS opening to commercial ventures in general — including private tourist outfits. The latter will be able to arrange the privately funded, dedicated commercial spaceflights for eager visitors, using NASA-developed US spacecraft. They'll also be responsible for flight crews, as well as ensuring that private astronauts meet the necessary medical and training requirements. https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1137000745922957313 Overall, NASA's statement talks of accelerating "a thriving commercial economy in low-earth orbit" — with businesses able to operate out of the station. While more than 50 companies are already involved with the ISS, their work is currently restricted to research and development; however that'll no longer be the case. Expect to keep hearing more about the agency's commercial efforts, given that there's another aim in store as well: landing the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024.
Vampires can be slain by staking them in the heart. Werewolves aren't fond of silver bullets. But Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's addition to the undead world can't and won't be killed — not that anyone would want that outcome. First, What We Do in the Shadows jumped from a short film to a hilarious feature-length comedy. Next, it not only inspired an Emmy-nominated US television remake, but also New Zealand television spinoff Wellington Paranormal. And in the latter's case, following its first two exceptionally amusing seasons, it's returning to Australian screens for its six-episode third season this month. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: trust a mockumentary about the undead to keep coming back in new guises. The Cops-style spinoff follows police officers Karen O'Leary and Mike Minogue, who WWDITS fans might remember came knocking at the vampire share house's door. With the help of Sergeant Maaka (Maaka Pohatu), the cop duo keep trying to keep the city safe from supernatural happenings — including not only bloodsuckers and lycanthropes, but ghosts, aliens and more. Wellington Paranormal's third season once again explores the spate of paranormal phenomena popping up in the city, with a whole heap of new spooky occurrences attracting O'Leary, Minogue and Maaka's attention. And, as it keeps wandering through strange but funny and silly territory, it'll welcome another familiar face, with Rhys Darby set to reprise his What We Do In The Shadows role. Although he won't be appearing on-screen, Clement directed half of the new season's episodes, too. In Australia, Wellington Paranormal airs on SBS Viceland and streams via SBS On Demand, which'll remain the case again this year. Episodes will drop weekly on both the free-to-air channel and the online platform from Wednesday, February 24. For those following What We Do in the Shadows' continued evolution, Wellington Paranormal's success shouldn't come as a surprise. When the show was first revealed, Waititi described it as "Mulder and Scully but in a country where nothing happens" on Twitter, after all. Wellington Paranormal's third season starts screening on SBS Viceland and SBS On Demand from Wednesday, February 24.
For his latest solo exhibition at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Tokujin Yoshioka has again indulged his fascination with organic structures and natural processes, embracing the interaction between prisms, space and light. In his series of striking sculptures and installations, Yoshioka aims to expose the beauty and energy present within self-generating wonders such as crystal formation, harnessing the process to become part of the art itself. He quite literally grows his artworks, using a special liquid that allows natural crystals to develop into whatever shape they choose, after which he sometimes decides to attach them to a base of some kind. And, like any true gardening fanatic, he believes in playing music to his 'plants' as they grow. His series entitled Swan Lake apparently blossomed under the soothing companionship of Tchaikovsky. Whilst we happen to think the huge fairy floss-like clouds of crystal comprising Tornado 2007 are pretty spectacular, the large-scale installation Rainbow Church has been heralded as the exhibition's highlight: a huge window made of 500 crystal prisms inspired by Henri Matisse's designs for the Rosaire Chapel. Yoshioka is known for combining architecture, design and installation art. His furniture designs appear at Salone del Mobile annually and he has also designed store interiors for high fashion brands such as Hermès and Issey Miyake. Via Yatzer.com. Images from the MOT.
Whenever a new season of Stranger Things drops, a familiar cycle kicks into gear. The latest batch of episodes arrive, everyone binge-watches them as quickly as Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) eats Eggos, and then the waiting begins. First, we wait to find out if the 80s-set dose of supernatural hijinks will continue. Then, we wait to learn exactly when it'll be coming back. It's taken a couple of months after the third season hit back in July, but Netflix has finally taken care of the first question. And the answer is yes. As announced in the streaming platform's favourite way — via video — Stranger Things will return for a fourth bout of battles against demogorgons, mind flayers and the like. Alas, Netflix hasn't revealed any particulars in the way of a date, but it has dropped a crucial narrative tidbit. We hope you haven't gotten too comfortable in the show's small-town setting, because the next season will step beyond its bounds. The telling catchphrase that accompanies the renewal announcement clip: "we're not in Hawkins anymore". While season three's final moments hinted at venturing to a new location, Netflix's new video nods in one direction: the Upside Down. Of course, just what that'll mean is bound to spawn a never-ending onslaught of speculation until whenever the next season releases. Still, it's probably safe to assume that Eleven, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will (Noah Schnapp), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max (Sadie Sink), Steve (Joe Keery), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and the gang — and Joyce (Winona Ryder), too — will be pushed even further out of their comfort zones. If you're particularly fond of the series' creators, the Duffer Brothers have also committed to Netflix beyond the show, so expect other series and even films with them at the helm. Don't think they're leaving the show that brought them to fame, though — or, that Stranger Things is completely done with its regular locale either. Announcing the news, the twins said in a statement that they "can't wait to tell many more stories together — beginning, of course, with a return trip to Hawkins". Check out the Stranger Things season four announcement video below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIiDY4WA0oo&feature=youtu.be Stranger Things' fourth season doesn't yet have a release date, but we'll update you when it does.
You've crooned your way through sing-along screenings of Spice World, wished you could visit the huge memorabilia exhibition in Britain and just generally been following Spice Girls news since the English pop stars unleashed their brand of girl power on the world back in the 90s. Now, come 2020, Australians just might be able to spice up their lives with the group itself — according to Melanie Brown, aka Mel B, they're coming our way. As part of their Spice World reunion tour, Mel B and her bandmates Melanie Chisholm, Emma Bunton and Geri Halliwell have been playing gigs across the British Isles, bringing their zigazig-ah back to stadiums. They just played their last concert in London on Saturday, June 15 UK time, during which Mel B concluded the proceedings by saying "we'll see you in February in Australia". https://twitter.com/HalinaWatts86/status/1140009527129137152 No further details have been revealed, and nor has an official tour announcement at this stage — but here's hoping that if anyone is in the know about the Spice Girls' plans, it's one of the Spice Girls themselves while the group is on stage. If you're a fan, you'll wannabe hollering about the chance to see Scary, Sporty, Baby and Ginger perform in Australia for the first time — in a huge light and costume-filled performance, no less. Victoria Beckham, aka Posh, isn't part of the current shows, so this won't be the full Spice experience. Still, four out of five Spice Girls is better than none. It has been a big week for Spice news, with an animated Spice Girls movie also just announced, targeting a 2020 release. Unlike the live shows, it'll feature the whole Spice gang, according to The Hollywood Reporter. And, it'll include both new and old songs as well. The Spice Girls look set to tour Australia in February 2020, with dates and venues yet to be revealed. We'll keep you posted with further details as they come to hand.
